NASA’s decision to scrap its $11 billion, 15-year mission to Mars to bring back samples could create a startup feeding frenzy, TechCrunch reports. Describing its plans as too slow, and too ex...
Serve Robotics, the Uber and Nvidia-backed sidewalk robot delivery company, debuted publicly on the New York stock exchange Thursday, making it the latest startup to choose going public via a rever...
Nzero developed a new algorithm that helps building owners estimate their carbon pollution down to the hour.
The startup is developing a technology it claims is as fast and energy efficient as 3D printing at a cost that can compete with sand casting.
Dataplor’s “secret sauce” combines technology and public domain data with a human factor, employing over 100,000 people, called Explorers, to validate all the data via computer.
There has been much evolution in the personalized phone protector market, but nothing has truly captured screens yet.
The CFPB is permanently banning BloomTech from consumer lending activities and its CEO, Austen Allred, from student lending for a period of 10 years.
Spend management startup Ramp has raised another $150 million at a post-money valuation of $7.65 billion, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today. New investor Khosla Ventures and existing backer...
Paris-based Dark is taking on the dual problems of debris and conflict in orbit with their mobile platform designed to launch, attach to, and ultimately de-orbit uncooperative objects in space. Dar...
TechCrunch Early Stage is gearing up for another insightful event on April 25, and one roundtable session promises to be particularly illuminating for early-stage founders. Titled “Finance Fu...
This week Boston Dynamics retired its well-known Atlas robot that was powered by hydraulics. Then today it unveiled its new Atlas robot, which is powered by electricity. The change might not seem l...
Jaclyn Johnson and Angeline Vuong were on a hike deliberating how hard it can be for people to get started in angel investing when they realized they had stumbled upon a startup idea.
NeuBird founders Goutham Rao and Vinod Jayaraman came from Portworx, a cloud-native storage solution they eventually sold to PureStorage in 2019 for $370 million. It was their third successful exit...
What is worth $11 billion and wants to go to Mars to collect rocks? NASA’s mission to Mars to collect rocks that was expected to cost $11 billion and take ages. So, the U.S. space agency is t...
Inversion Space is aptly named. The three-year-old startup’s primary concern is not getting things to space, but bringing them back — transforming the ultimate high ground into “a transportation la...
Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2017, is now launching a consumer banking product. Mercury today serves more than 100,000 businesses, many of which are startups, via its B2B practice. ...
The startup is decarbonizing heavy industry using aluminum as a fuel, an approach inspired by a future mission to Europa.
Late last summer, TechCrunch joined forces with StrictlyVC to create smaller, more intimate evenings for our readers. Already this year, we’ve hosted these nights in San Francisco and Los Angeles, ...
Companies can identify qualified suppliers from Diagon’s network of equipment suppliers, system integrators and service providers. Then leverage a toolkit to manage those complex projects.
Amira Rasool founded The Folklore in 2018 to help fashion brands from emerging markets like Africa, Asia and The Caribbean tap into the international market. In 2022, the startup introduced The Fol...
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the bedrock of everything we do online. APIs allow two things on the internet to talk with each other, including connected devices or phone apps. But t...
Once a Kickstarter campaign is complete, you need to turn to a creator’s own page to buy the products after the campaign clock has ticked down — that is, until now. Today, Kickstarter a...
Betaworks is embracing the AI trend not with yet another LLM, but instead a clutch of agent-type models automating everyday tasks that nevertheless aren’t so simple to define. The investor...
Evolution Equity Partners, a growth capital firm based in NYC, has raised $1.1 billion for a new cyber- and AI-focused fund.
Overall, 16% of Maven’s portfolio companies have reached a minimum $500 million exit or valuation, which is 10x industry average, the firm said.
It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters. They are, after all, an abstraction in themselves of virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s. Loft Labs saw a ...
Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up t...
The app is designed to make people who usually play an instrument on their own feel like they’re part of a worldwide band.
Are you gearing up to secure funding for your startup or maybe you’ve raised a little bit already? If so, ensuring your cap table and data room are pristine could be the difference between a ...
Zypsy, a design firm with a track record of helping early-stage startups, has launched a new and somewhat unique venture investment program. It will be offering 10 startups up to $100,000 of brand ...
When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health. Two Chairs used technology — a proprietary matching algorithm — to ...
The long-term goal with Rivos is to build chips primarily for servers that can handle intensive data analytics and AI workloads, including generative AI workloads.
Quilt promises its heat pump will be a sleeker design that can be installed in more places around a room than competitors’ offerings.
finmid is building an embedded finance product that targets that relationship between marketplaces and sellers, and raised a Series A round to further build out its product and enter new markets.
The Tel Aviv-based company recently announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by NFX, with participation from FJ Labs and Gefen Capital.
A new report from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) found that global investment in AI fell for the second year in a row in 2023.
Today on Equity, Tesla cuts staff, and OpenAI has plans for an office in Tokyo along with a new GPT-4 model for the Japanese language.
Kode’s platform allows customers to control HVAC and lighting, monitor energy use, track carbon emissions and keep an eye on water consumption.
Companies that offer role referral bonuses do so with the assumption that their employees know their work culture — and a role’s requirements — best. But what if companies were to...
Lawhive has raised £9.5 million ($11.9 million) in a seed round to offer AI-driven services to ‘main street’ law firms.
Social media startup ShareChat’s valuation has cratered below $2 billion from nearly $5 billion in a new funding round.
Since 2015, Pula, an insurtech based in Kenya, has been keen on enhancing the access to agricultural insurance by small-holder farmers across emerging markets, shielding them against losses from pe...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at how two fintech companies serving the underserved are faring, and more! To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintec...
Airchat is a new social media app that encourages users to “just talk.” A previous version of Airchat was released last year, but the team — led by AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinde...
Akamai Technologies is in advanced acquisition talks with Noname Security, an API cybersecurity startup, according to a people person familiar with the deal.
From remote work to magnetic keyboard switches, we have your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Xpanceo has shared its complete presentation deck, consisting of 19 slides. Dive into its pitch deck to learn how the company raised $40 million.
The startup has raised $28 million to help fund a nationwide expansion of its cardboard-based cellulose building insulation.
When it comes to news items that we love at TechCrunch, IPOs rank pretty darn high. Another great newsy bit that comes along less frequently than we’d like is a startup buying another startup...
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 isn’t just another tech startup event — it’s the destination for early-stage startups to get hands-on, actionable insights to scale their business directly f...
India is getting an electric three-wheeler passenger vehicle that charges from 0 to 100% in 15 minutes. The launch of the new EV — a collaboration between auto manufacturer Omega Seiki Mobili...
The 9-year-old Hinge Health offers a digital solution to treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions and was last valued at $6.2 billion in October 2021.
The story of warehouse robotics is a story of attempting to keep up with Amazon. It’s been more than a decade since the online giant revolutionized its delivery services through its Kiva Systems ac...
We are thrilled to unveil our latest innovation: ScaleUp Startups Exhibitor Program at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Tailored specifically for startups in Series A to B funding stages with $35 million o...
Airtree Ventures uses the secondary market to slim down its stakes while waiting for its portfolio companies to exit.
Fund-of-funds investor Cendana Capital has joined with Kline Hill Partners for a new oversubscribed fund to buy out stakes from seed LPs looking for liquidity.
Lerato Motloung is a mother of two who works in a supermarket in Johannesburg, South Africa. After her phone was stolen, Motloung had to go without a mobile phone for nine months because she could ...
Checkr, a 10-year-old startup that offers employee background checks, has laid off 382 employees — 32% of its workforce.
Brazilian startup Salvy, a mobile carrier for businesses, was the only company based in Latin America in Y Combinator’s latest batch, the accelerator confirmed to TechCrunch.
Today on Equity we dig into Multiverse’s acquisition of Searchlight, Guesty’s massive Series F, Monad Labs and Cyera’s mega-round.
E-commerce’s field remains vast and fertile, and further evidence of this has surfaced in the form of one of the largest fundraises by a startup in Turkey.
Humanoids have sucked a lot of the air out of the room. It is, after all, a lot easier to generate press for robots that look and move like humans. Ultimately, however, both the efficacy and scalab...
Anticipation is building for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, where industry leaders and budding entrepreneurs alike are eagerly awaiting a bevy of startup-focused sessions. We’re excited to high...
The company, based out of New York with roots in Israel, says its revenue has increased 5x in the last 3 years, and it expects to turn profitable this year.
Today, Yoshi Mobility settled into three business lines: preventative maintenance, virtual vehicle inspections and electric vehicle charging.
By adding Standard Notes to its portfolio of apps, Proton will deepen its reach with an engaged community of pro-privacy users.
The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute. While some building materials like steel get consistently recycled back in...
Among the highlights of Early Stage are its fan-favorite roundtable sessions. These intimate gatherings, guided by experts, delve into targeted subjects crafted to enlighten, invigorate, and enhanc...
The deal, which was for $125 million according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross-platform messaging solution.
Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV) plans to back up to 21 growth-stage companies across the continent after closing its first fund at $60 million. The pan-African VC hit the milestone following fr...
With Metalab Ventures, the venture arm will play the role of a long-term value investor, essentially “putting our money where our mouth is,” CEO Luke Des Cotes said.
In February, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google‘s DeepMind AI research lab, warned that throwing increasing amounts of compute at the types of AI algorithms in wide use today could lead to dim...
If you think that choosing a nail polish color or which ingredients go into your face cream can’t have anything to do with blockchain, think again. Kiki World, a beauty startup launched last ...
Get ready to amplify your Early Stage 2024 experience with the electrifying lineup of Side Events taking Boston by storm during the week of April 22–28. As the countdown to TechCrunch Early Stage b...
Sprinto, a startup offering a security compliance and risk platform, has raised $20 million in new investment led by Accel.
Multiverse, the U.K. unicorn that builds apprenticeship programs for people to learn technology skills while on the job, has made an acquisition as it aims to skill up itself. The company has bough...
Hey, early-stage founders, listen up! TechCrunch is searching for 200 trailblazing startups to feature in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this October. Following ...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and ...
Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO after resigning in October over controversial statements he made about the Israel/Gaza war last yea...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at just how many fintech companies made it into Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort, how much funding slid in the first quarter, and more! To g...
Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial, never-boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, as well as an angel investor, passed away last month at age 41 owing to “complications from a recurring brain t...
EarliTec’s FDA-authorized device helps clinicians diagnose children showing signs of autism as young as 16 months old.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to receive the Startups Weekly newsletter in your inboxes. It’s the most w...
At the upcoming TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 event taking place in Boston on April 25, one session will stand out for early-stage companies seeking to navigate the turbulent waters of tech and staff...
Get ready to ignite the tech world with your passion and expertise! TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is set to electrify San Francisco from October 28–30, and we’re searching for vibrant speakers like...
Well-known startup accelerator Y Combinator held one of its two yearly Demo Day events this week, showcasing hundreds of startups that recently went through its program. Judging from our coverage o...
What a week, everyone. Two full days of Y Combinator demo day activity kept us busy, but the latest accelerator cohort’s launch was far from the only big story in startup land. Today on TechC...
Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit. The company’s $90 million Series B round marks an inflectio...
Cross-border is hot right now, so it’s no surprise that one of the trends among Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch of nearly 30 fintech startups is how to more easily move money globally.
Robovision has raised $42M to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core.
Get ready for an electrifying showdown as the “So You Think You Can Pitch” startup pitch competition at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is set to be judged by an esteemed panel of industry ...
As we did on Wednesday, a number of the TechCrunch crew watched the entire run of presentations, picking out a handful of favorites to highlight.
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is gearing up to showcase the next wave of innovation. Among the standout finalists for the highly anticipated “So You Think You Can Pitch” segment are three...
CB Insights released its Q1 2024 State of Venture Report, revealing that fintech funding slid by 16% during the three-month period.
Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto has surpassed the annualised sales milestone of $1 billion within 29 months of its inception, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note Thursday, citing Zepto management. Ze...
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a R...
Two years ago, Jobs for the Future (JFF), a nonprofit dedicated to helping low-wage workers attain upward mobility, established a venture arm, JFFVentures, to back innovative employment tech. In a ...
As big social apps are optimizing for maximum engagement using algorithmic feeds and personalized content recommendations, Retro wants to go in the opposite direction: The company is launching a ne...
SiMa.ai, a Silicon Valley–based startup producing embedded machine learning (ML) system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, today announced that it has raised a $70 million extension funding round as it plans...
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is welcoming an outstanding addition to its roster of speakers as Paris Heymann, partner at Index Ventures, takes the stage. In his session titled “Scaling Through...
Coalesce offers a platform that standardizes data while automating the more repetitive, mundane data transformation processes.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a $145 million funding round just five years after its inception. The enterprise software company offers a business planning platform for large companies to v...
NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $109 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round. In 2...
Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal is in talks to raise capital for his new startup, Indian fintech Navi. Bansal is talking to investors to raise at a valuation of around $2 billion, three sources f...
SingleInterface, a SaaS startup offering tools to offline businesses to grow their revenues by leveraging the web, has raised $30 million in its maiden external fundraising round as the Singaporean...
Despite an overall decline in startup investing, funding for AI surged in the past year. Capital toward generative AI ventures alone nearly octupled from 2022 to 2023, reaching $25.2 billion toward...
Nightside is the brainchild of Jess Gupta. The $350 LED bedside lamp is an intentionally simple product. It doesn’t have Wi-Fi or Alexa built in, but it does have a few clever tricks up its s...
Discover the forefront of hard tech innovation in an exclusive session sponsored by HAX at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Led by SOSV general partner Duncan Turner and HAX chief science officer Dr. S...
News that Yahoo is buying Artifact stirred the technology watercooler yesterday. Artifact was an interesting app, employing AI to help its users find and consume more, and more targeted news. It ha...
Zip describes itself as the “leading Intake and Procurement Orchestration platform and Intake-to-Pay suite.” That doesn’t sound like the most exciting space to be in as a startup,...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, when we take a moment to dig in...
Homebase’s human resources and team management app targets the two-thirds of Americans who will never work from home.
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by G...
SiftHub, an AI startup founded by LogiNext co-founder and former CTO Manisha Raisinghani, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding.
Full Glass Wine, a brand acquisition management startup that specializes in acquiring wine marketplaces, has raised a $14 million Series A round to continue acquiring DTC (direct-to-consumer) wine ...
BlaBlaCar is an iconic name in the French startup ecosystem. The carpooling and bus ticketing company has been around for so long that it’s hard to consider it a startup anymore. Still, BlaBlaCar i...
Rubrik initially presents as a moderately growing software business with net losses that stretched to $354 million in its most recent fiscal year.
Garry Tan expressed his displeasure at California State Assembly member Matt Haney over a proposed late-night email bill he authored.
Available in “soft launch,” Read’s new capability connects to Gmail, Outlook and Slack as well as videoconferencing platforms to learn topics that might be relevant to you.
A few years ago, Darren Shimkus, ex-president of Udemy, had a conversation with Dennis Yang about skills building. Shimkus was of the belief that building skills in the corporate sector was a diffi...
Using Quadratic, users can bring in hundreds of thousands of rows of data, write analyses in their preferred programming language and share the results with outside stakeholders.
The funding climate for AI chip startups, once as sunny as a mid-July day, is beginning to cloud over as Nvidia asserts its dominance. According to a recent report, U.S. chip firms raised just $881...
Migrant workers are a critical labor force for U.S. farms, but getting them here on proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is taxing for farms. Seso wa...
In the world of tech, innovation knows no bounds. And at the forefront of this ever-evolving landscape, AI stands tall, casting its transformative spell on everything it touches. But amid the buzz,...
AIF still has resources in its first fund to do a “handful” more deals as well as follow-on investments.
Onego Bio claims Bioalbumen is “bioidentical” to ovalbumin, which is the major protein in chicken egg white.
Footage obtained by TechCrunch shows the catastrophic ending that Astra’s Rocket 3.0 suffered during prelaunch testing in March 2020. The explosion, which occurred at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Com...
Former president Donald Trump’s digital media company is losing money, and lots of it. But why is that any different from other “startups,” which often struggle to post a profit f...
At Early Stage in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 25, 2024, TechCrunch will gather some of the startup world’s leading companies — but our partners provide more than just financial support. Their p...
The modern world is dependent on a vast network for extracting, processing, transporting and ultimately consuming hydrocarbons like crude oil and natural gas. But these resources come with a cost: ...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, where we dig into the weekend and ...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at Robinhood’s new Gold Card, challenges in the BaaS space and how a tiny startup caught Stripe’s eye. To get a ro...
Finally, something that makes climate change relatable.
Iron Sheepdog credits its ability to gain traction with truck brokers because it got the truckers themselves to sign on first.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. There’s not that much news from me t...
It’s rare that I come across a pitch deck that ticks almost all the boxes. It’s so good, in fact, that I fed Plantee’s deck into an AI tool I built, and it determined there was a ...
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most cri...
Supaglue’s team will accelerate the work Stripe’s been working on real-time analytics and reporting across its platform.
The final countdown is on! Today, March 29, marks the final opportunity to grab your early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 — a one-day event set to ignite your entrepreneurial journey ...
Founder Byju Raveendran is making a last-ditch attempt to placate the embattled Indian startup’s disgruntled investors.
We last checked in on Zaver, a Swedish B2C buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now closed a $10 million extension to its ...
All parents know that raising kids is expensive. Especially in those early years when they quickly outgrow clothes or toys, leaving parents on a never-ending cycle of buying new stuff when the old ...
This morning, Skyflow announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B extension led by Khosla Ventures. The deal is interesting on a number of fronts, including the round’s structure and ...
Wonderschool, a startup that provides software and support to help individuals and local governments spin up childcare businesses, has acquired EarlyDay, which operates an early childhood educator ...
Google.org, Google’s charitable wing, is launching a new program to help fund nonprofits developing tech that leverages generative AI. Called Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, the progra...
Matter Venture Partners will invest in between 15 and 20 companies with the new fund in the area of “hard tech.”
ChowNow acquired Cuboh, a point-of-sale platform that consolidates all orders from delivery apps into one place.
The clock has almost run out! With just 48 hours left, this is your final opportunity to secure early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Don’t miss out on this chance to join indus...
Metaview integrates with apps, phone systems, videoconferencing platforms and tools like Calendly and GoodTime to automatically capture the content of interviews.
While super{set} is backed by external investors, some of its capital comes from founding managing partners Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaidya, who previously co-founded Krux and sold it to Salesforce.
Its long-term goal is to make more efficient semiconductors with a lower carbon footprint, while supporting what its CEO refers to as “the electrification of society,” starting with tra...
Blueground, which operates a global network of furnished apartment rentals for stays of a month or more, has raised $45 million, on sales of $560 million.
Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use. A Euro...
Byju’s secured favorable outcomes in two court hearings Thursday, paving the way for the embattled edtech startup to move ahead with the extraordinary general meeting scheduled for Friday. On...
Climate tech VC Satgana has reached a final close of its first fund, which aims to back up to 30 early-stage startups in Africa and Europe. The VC firm reached a final close of €8 million ($8.6 mil...
StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding r...
By any benchmark, Accel is among the top venture firms in India. With nearly two dozen Indian unicorn startups, including several category leaders, Accel’s track record speaks for itself. Yet...
NewRetirement builds software to help people create financial retirement plans.
Troy Sheets began making music at 15 years old in his home studio with a keyboard synthesizer, drum machine and four-track cassette recorder — an impressive setup for a high school sophomore. Howev...
In the summer after his freshman year at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an engineering school in Worcester, Massachusetts, Cyvl.ai co-founder and CEO Daniel Pelaez needed a job. He went home and ...
Century Health is applying AI to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs.
March 29 is the final day to grab your early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. With only 3 days left to secure your tickets, don’t miss out on this opportunity to join us for a tr...
A new study that zeros-in on the founders of so-called “unicorns” — companies worth over a billion dollars — has found most have “underdog” founders who are often drawn from the t...
Harvesting methane from organic waste and using it to produce electricity or heat is nothing new, but the startup isn’t building another anaerobic digester.
When Marissa Mayer co-founded a startup six years ago in Palo Alto, California, expectations were sky high for the former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee. When that startup, Sunshine, revealed ...
PayPal Ventures’ latest investment is in an Indonesian startup that provides personal insurance products covering a variety of risks, including accidents, phone screen damage, and ticket canc...
Scores of accelerator programs run every year with the aim of identifying and cultivating founders in the earliest stages of building a company. Only a fraction seek out founders who are explicitly...
As the planet warms due to human-caused climate change, damage from wildfires has increased with it. The amount of forest area burned by wildfires increased 320% from 1996 to 2021, according to the...
Banking-as-a-service startup (BaaS) Synctera has conducted a restructuring that has resulted in a staff reduction, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. While Synctera did not share how many employe...
The startup emerged from stealth with a goal of extending the range of EVs while also eliminating fossil fuels from home heating.
Artifact, the well-received AI-powered news app from Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, may not be shutting down as planned. The company announced in January the award-wi...
What do you call an AI company that is suffering from very public gyrations regarding its business health, place in the market and leadership structure? Well, you might call it Stability AI. And no...
Dan Laufer swore off ever founding a startup again after he sold apartment rental platform RentLingo in 2021, but Laufer also couldn’t ignore the potential to solve a problem he saw unfolding...
Ionobell, a seed stage startup, claims its silicon material will be cheaper than the established competition.
Just about everyone is trying to get a piece of the generative AI action these days. While the majority of the focus remains on the model vendors like OpenAI, Anthropic and Cohere, or the bigger co...
The startup is attempting to solve hydrogen’s supply problem by focusing not on novel materials, but on manufacturing.
Unlike other meal service providers that want you to be customers for life, Chiyo’s goal is to get you off of its program.
Time is slipping away! With only 4 days left, the clock is ticking on your chance to snag the early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Don’t miss out — secure your ticket now and s...
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Thoras.ai founders Nilo Rahmani and Jennifer Rahmani weren’t even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, but their parents were forced to flee along wi...
Alexandre Boulanger is better known for building self-balancing exoskeletons at Wandercraft. For his next trick, the Paris-based robotics entrepreneur is fronting work on a far lighter kind of wear...
Uzum, an e-commerce startup offering online shopping, fintech and food deliveries to millions of customers in Uzbekistan, has raised $114 million in funding, becoming the country’s first unic...
Here’s the harsh truth behind personal care products: You’re mostly buying water and plastic. The main ingredient in a bottle of shampoo or shower gel is water, which is then mixed with a bunch of ...
Last year, Salesforce, the company best known for its cloud sales support software (and Slack), spearheaded a project called ProGen to design proteins using generative AI. A research moonshot, ProG...
Maju Kuruvilla is no longer CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt. He is replaced by Justin Grooms, Bolt’s global head of sales, who is now interim CEO, according to Grooms’ LinkedIn profile. Kuru...
Get ready to amplify your Early Stage 2024 experience with the electrifying lineup of Side Events taking Boston by storm during the week of April 22–28. As the countdown to TechCrunch Early Stage b...
The Reddit and Astera Labs IPOs last week ate up a lot of media oxygen. And with good reason, the two tech IPOs priced well and traded with even more gusto. After a long dearth for technology offer...
Today on Equity, Alex talks stocks around the world, crypto prices, and the weekend’s biggest news: The the exit of Stability AI’s CEO, the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Spotify’...
Startup visionaries, time is of the essence! There are only 5 days left to take advantage of the early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Don’t let this opportunity slip through yo...
In a market that no longer favors growth at all costs, GoStudent’s €3 billion valuation and global expansion may belong to the past. However, the Austrian tutoring platform reshaped quickly. ...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at some hot fintech startups in Africa, how Mint’s closure has been Copilot’s gain and why VCs have do...
Mallard Bay is building a marketplace and a vertical SaaS platform for guided fishing and hunting industries.
In an era where data is king and its volume and complexity are exploding, Protecto aims to eliminate the long-standing dilemma businesses face between leveraging AI’s power while ensuring dat...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Helloooo, startup nerds! I spent much of t...
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most cri...
Don’t miss out on your chance to shine at “So You Think You Can Pitch,” our highly anticipated segment at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, happening in Boston on April 25. Pitching is...
After three years of efforts, World Fund has finally closed a €300 million first fund, €50 million short of its target in 2021, but still a considerable number given a background of war and economi...
Exactly how much Microsoft is paying all the investors of Inflection AI as part its oddly structured deal to abscond with the co-founders, much of the staff and the rights to use the tech hasn̵...
Crafting the perfect venture capital pitch is so simple that there’s an industry of consultants to help founders get their decks in order. TechCrunch has a long-running series of Pitch Deck T...
The company reached profitability in 2023, however, more customers began asking for web and Android capabilities so they could share Copilot with family and friends.
The expense management arena is a crowded one, with well-funded players such as Brex, Ramp and Navan all clamoring for market share. Those companies are generally focused on tech startups and large...
The Browser Company, which makes the Arc browser, has raised $50 million in a round led by Pace Capital at a $550 million valuation, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The company’s head of ...
A new app from a startup called Cherry is aiming to transform the online shopping experience with its AI assistant that allows users to discover products across the internet using just a screenshot...
Redis, the popular in-memory data store, is switching away from the open source three-clause BSD license. Instead, in a move that is clearly aimed to prevent the large cloud providers from offering...
Chances are you may have noticed that many commercial vehicles are now electric vehicles — think delivery vans, telecom minivans, utility maintenance trucks, and so on. But there are still many die...
Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands between 20% and 40%. For Kenya, unlike the developed world, food loss, not waste, is the greater problem, ...
The carbon accounting startup targets SMBs to help them assess the carbon footprint of their operations and products.
Astera Labs started its life as a public company trading at $52.56 per share, up 46% when the bell rang. The company priced its IPO last night at $36 per share, above its raised price range. Astera...
OTB Ventures’ new $185 million fund for deep tech in Europe will mostly be deployed at the Series A stage; but up to 10% could be allocated to seed funding, and more than 50% to follow-on inv...
Electric boat maker Candela is approaching cruising speed with $25 million in new funding and the first commercial deployment of its new P-12 ferry in New Zealand. The company has global ambitions ...
Mermaid, the open source diagramming and charting tool, has long been popular with developers for its ability to create diagrams using a Markdown-like language. As is often the case, Mermaid founde...
Owners of aging EVs aren’t exactly flush with options if something breaks after the original warranty expires. One Bay Area startup called Amber thinks it can help them navigate that minefiel...
The startup is betting its proprietary liquid and partnerships with enhanced geothermal energy companies will solve some of direct air capture’s problems.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and ventur...
Join us for an unforgettable opportunity at TechCrunch Early Stage in Boston on April 25! We’re on the lookout for enthusiastic volunteers to be part of this exciting event. If you’ve e...
The new firm follows the startup studio model, hoping to tap into a likely wave of climate-related investments.
You won’t have to search very hard or go very far to engage in compelling conversations next month at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. One of the most popular attractions at Early Stage are roundtables...
Globally, healthcare IT systems are groaning under the weight of legacy platforms. Thankfully, there’s a new wave of startups entering the arena: U.K. startup Anima is a “care enablemen...
India-based audio platform Pocket FM has secured $103 million in Series D funding led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Stepstone Group. The company, which counts Tencent and Times In...
India’s Ultrahuman is prepping for a growth year. Today it’s announcing the close of $35 million in Series B* funding, a mix of equity ($25 million) and debt. The smart ring startup is ...
Have you ever needed a copy of your medical imaging to take to your doctor or another healthcare provider and been handed a CD? You’re not alone. Many radiologists still use CDs and similar a...
Rather than grimly assembling data about cancer deaths to predict outcomes in treatment, the founders of Cure51 had another idea.
Cowboy is better known for its sleek electric bikes that you can see in many major cities across Europe. And if you look at the persons riding those Cowboy bikes, most of the time, you’ll see a you...
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less than a year later, Microsoft annou...
Los Angeles-based Gitai said Tuesday that its autonomous robotic arm has nailed a tech demonstration outside the International Space Station. Gitai CEO Sho Nakanose told TechCrunch in an interview ...
Fintech exploded over the last five years. Startups in the category raised more than $350 billion in VC funding from 2019 through 2023, according to data from CB Insights. Despite all that growth, ...
Link-in-bio startup Linktree introduced new features today including a featured layout to highlight links better, the ability to fetch the latest posts from Instagram and support for a more promine...
The five-person firm is one of the few, if not the only, funds focused exclusively on strengthening opportunities between these two countries.
TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband and CTO Ralph Gootee helped build their previous startup, PlanGrid, into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $875 million in 2018....
Time is running out to be a part of the action at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024! Want to make a splash in Boston’s tech scene? Don’t miss your opportunity to host a Side Event — applicati...
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov said on his channel today that the company secured $330 million in investment through bond sales last week. Durov said that the offering was oversubscribed with...
Miami-based Onyx Private, a Y Combinator-backed digital bank that provided banking and investment services for high-earning Millennials and Gen Zers, is terminating its bank operations. In a March ...
Sensor Tower, a leading app analytics firm, is acquiring rival Data.ai in a move that consolidates the mobile intelligence industry, creating a powerhouse that could dominate the sector and provide...
Tech aficionados, startup enthusiasts, marketing wizards, and venture capitalists on the rise — seize the opportunity to showcase your expertise at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, happening from October 2...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Monday show, in which we take a look back at ...
The job of so-called “solutions professionals” — people like sales engineers, solutions architects and consultants — revolves around pitching complex enterprise tech to pote...
It’s come down to this, startup fans. Today’s the last day to beat the buzzer and claim the biggest discount on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024, taking place October 28–30. Here’s a simple questi...
Customers can trade in an old Samsung Galaxy for a discount on an iPad, an Apple HomePod mini for a Nintendo Switch, or an iPhone for a Nothing phone.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Equity turns...
Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund ADIA is in talks to back Pocket FM in a large new round of funding, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, as the Indian audio-storytelling pl...
Apple has added another AI startup to its acquisition list with Canada-based DarwinAI, which specializes in vision-based tech to observe components during manufacturing to improve efficiency, Bloom...
Zscaler, a cloud security company with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity. ...
If you asked a bunch of VCs at the end of 2023 if the IPO market would finally open again in 2024, most of them would have said yes. We know because TechCrunch surveyed more than 40 of them in Dece...
Coreshell, a battery materials startup, revealed a breakthrough this week that could lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries while reducing reliance on China.
Ticktock! Only 48 hours remain to snag your discounted tickets to Disrupt 2024! Shift into high gear and save up to a whopping $1,000 by seizing this opportunity before the clock strikes at 11:59 p...
ShopMy, a marketing platform for content creators to connect with brands and monetize their content, announced that it raised $18.5 million. The company will use the money to help scale its network...
After a shakeup at Kleiner Perkins a few years back, one of its star B2B investors, Ted Schlein, started his own firm. Ballistic has already closed a second fund, even bigger than the first.
When the open source streaming service Apache Kafka was created in 2011 at LinkedIn, it was a different world. Most companies were still on prem. The notion of cloud computing was just beginning to...
Satellite sensors collect an incredible amount of raw data, but on-orbit compute limitations mean that operators have little way to process this data in space. Aethero, a startup founded 13 months ...
There is perhaps no bigger jump for a startup to make than from the incubatory seed stage to its Series A round. Given how large a step-up landing a Series A can be, there are many guidelines out t...
Investors bet the startup’s algorithms, which feed on satellite data, will fill a significant gap in the methane market.
Content delivery networks (CDN) have changed. They used to be platforms for efficiently delivering static files — and little else. These days, however, virtually every CDN service is adding e...
Downshift into get ’er done gear, and you can save a hefty $1,000. How? Simply take decisive action and buy your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt before Friday, March 15 at 11:59 p.m. PT. We can think of...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
The cement startup promises to slash carbon emissions in the process, helping the company raise a $6.5 million seed round.
A new sports tech startup, Volley, aims to revolutionize the way racquet sports players (platform tennis, tennis, padel and pickleball) train with its AI-enabled sports training machine. Unlike tra...
Employee-focused mental health company Journey is acquiring Felt, a startup formerly known as Mine’d that specializes in matching individuals with therapists using artificial intelligence. Th...
The young automotive company raised $5.4 million and added a Tesla co-founder to its board.
Simulations are an essential step in physical product engineering. They enable engineers to create prototypes and understand how they might perform in the real world, accounting for factors like ae...
Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is investing $80 million in Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit u...
Kolet is a new French startup created by four experienced co-founders in the French tech ecosystem who want to make it easier to stay connected when you travel. The company has crafted an interesti...
This week, Glacier co-founder Rebecca Hu chats with Found about wish-cycling and robots.
When we examined venture investment amounts in enterprise SaaS startups, we were surprised at the top categories.
In enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS), usage-based pricing — a pricing model in which customers are charged only when they use a product or service — is gaining ground. According to a report f...
The wings of time are flying fast, and so is the countdown to the biggest savings on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt — taking place October 28–30 in San Francisco. Here’s the thing: You have only four...
The long-running dearth of IPOs could be coming to a close, partly due to Reddit’s upcoming public debut. Expected to list this month, Reddit saw its valuation soar during the pandemic. Now, ...
Deepgram has made a name for itself as one of the go-to startups for voice recognition. Today, the well-funded company announced the launch of Aura, its new real-time text-to-speech API. Aura combi...
A young startup is setting out to help enterprises cut their cloud costs by writing “more efficient” code — and it has secured $6.8 million in fresh funding from notable backers i...
Recalls are costly for — and damaging to — any company, no matter the size or market. For instance, McKinsey estimates that, for businesses manufacturing medical devices, recalls have b...
By using cell-free technology, Tierra is able to cut down protein manufacturing from months to weeks and enable customers to order proteins online.
MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the forefront of database technology for more than 50 years. The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and helped launch a...
Nanonets, a startup using AI to automate back-office processes, has raised $29 million in a new funding round led by Accel as it seeks to improve the accuracy of automation processes that involve l...
We’re getting closer to this year’s Early Stage get-together in Boston, which means that it’s time to add three more names to our ever-expanding list of whip-smart speakers coming...
AI might be the “it thing” of the moment. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting easier to deploy. According to a 2023 S&P Global survey, about half of companies with at lea...
France-based startup Nijta, whose flagship product Voice Harbor anonymizes voices for AI, raised €2 million in funding from various sources, including deep tech VC fund Elaia.
Barcelona-based clean tech startup SolarMente recently added Leonardo DiCaprio to its cap table, hence becoming the actor’s and activist’s first investment in the country.
If investors agree to pay its high-end range, Reddit’s valuation should hit around $5.4 billion.
Block Party, a startup developed by software engineer and tech diversity advocate Tracy Chou, was among the victims of Twitter’s (now X’s) API changes earlier this year, forcing it to p...
TechCrunch Disrupt, the premier early-stage startup conference, takes place on October 28–30 in San Francisco. Sure, that’s months from now. But if you want the best price, you gotta take action be...
“Hard tech” is the latest buzz phrase in venture capital, but all hard tech industries still rely on software infrastructure to ensure machines run properly, parts are shipped on time and that they...
Today we took a look at Reddit’s new IPO filing, the potential impact of Grok being open sourced, and why Bobby Kotick wants to buy TikTok.
Newlands VC, the super-secretive investment firm bankrolled by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, is leading a $10 million investment into SuperAGI, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The startup has a...
Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank, has now raised $24 million (£19 million) in a fresh, extended Series A, funding round.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at the piping hot global payroll space, neobank Dave’s financial results and related stock boost, and ...
Looking to leave your mark at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024? Our Side Events initiative offers a prime opportunity to connect with Boston’s vibrant tech scene in an unforgettable way. And the b...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our ...
The Mexico City-based startup raised a seed round to expand its solar installation platform.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I explored what happened to one...
TechCrunch Disrupt, the ultimate gathering for early-stage startups, is gearing up for its next edition on October 28–30 in San Francisco. Yes, that’s still several months away, but the clock...
Astek Diagnostics closed a $2 million round for its urine diagnostics system, despite the fact that raising money for medtech isn’t for the faint of heart. The company’s deck has some g...
Turo, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service, reported its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance this week in an updated IPO filing. The company first filed an S-1 to go p...
Throne, which lets fans gift items to creators from their wishlist, is launching a new gifting portal for family and friends called Happy Wishlist. However, the more interesting bit of the story is...
Yet another AI-powered fraud detection software provider is laying off staff. Inscribe, whose platform works to detect fraud in areas like business underwriting, tenant screening and onboarding, ha...
Welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today on the pod, Mary Ann and Alex dug into a whole mess of news.
For Fund II, Artemis intends to continue leading and co-leading investments and will target around 20 new companies.
Baron Capital, an investor in Indian food delivery startup Swiggy, has increased the value of its stake in the Indian firm, implying a valuation of $12.16 billion, surpassing the $10.7 billion post...
Lensrentals, a titan in the online rental service for photo, video, audio and lighting equipment, has announced its acquisition of BorrowLenses, a key competitor in the space of photographic and vi...
AI2 Incubator, spun out of the Allen Institute for AI in 2022, has secured a windfall $200 million in compute that startups going through its program can take advantage of to accelerate early devel...
Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents. Currently, the company is focused on support teams and security analysts — areas where both the u...
People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company wh...
Anonymous social apps are in for a reckoning. Yes, again. This week, University of North Carolina (UNC) System President Peter Hans announced a plan to block the use of popular anonymous social app...
Thanks to an uncertain economy, cybersecurity budgets are in a tight spot. According to a 2023 survey from IANS and recruiting firm Artico Search, more than a third of chief information security of...
Build something people want. It’s a simple concept — and one that Y Combinator loves to repeat — but one that can be hard to get right when building a startup. How strongly a tech...
While many entrepreneurs are currently facing the harsh reality of a VC funding crunch, Qonto isn’t one of them. The Paris-based business banking startup still has hundreds of millions of cash on h...
The largest funding rounds raised by startups are becoming rarer and rarer. For upstart companies working on the future of energy, however, the market is surprisingly strong. The venture decelerati...
Showee’s shower is designed for people with disabilities, both physical and intellectual. But Showee has another selling point: Water savings.
Calling all early-stage founders: Are you ready? TechCrunch is on the hunt for 200 early-stage founders to feature in the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this October...
Apex Space just moved one step closer to its goal of upending satellite bus manufacturing, with the startup announcing on Tuesday that its first vehicle is healthy on orbit. The company launched it...
Kurs Orbital, a startup founded by Ukrainian space industry veterans, has closed a new tranche of funding to accelerate the commercialization of its satellite servicing technology. The two-year-old...
In today’s episode of Equity, we talk about OpenAI bringing receipts to its tussle with Musk, Monzo’s big fundraise, a big startup deal, and new climate regulations.
In an e-mail exchange, Babylon Micro-Farms CEO Alexander Oleson tells me “we’ll have these in every school and apartment one day.” It’s a nice vision, and really the level of belief/commitment requ...
Making a video game successful is already hard. Doing so while complying with the growing number of child safety laws and regulations around the world is an almost insurmountable task. A new techno...
A South Korean startup called QuotaLab is on a quest to follow in the footsteps of Carta, the cap table management company that’s used by a host of startups and investors in the U.S. Carta st...
Remofirst says that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has grown 10x since it raised its $14.1 million seed round in September 2022.
UK startup Fluent has closed a $7.5M seed round to apply LLMs to business databases, making them far easier to interrogate.
The company went public in December with its first proof-of-concept coffee creamer that remains stable when added to hot coffee.
Saudi Arabia is poised to become one of the largest global construction hubs, owing to its trillion-dollar infrastructure and the real estate projects that are underway in the country. Yet even as ...
Founders have spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to build practical consumer use cases for AI and machine learning. AI startup Advocate thinks that the tech could help people apply ...
Harness Wealth, which started in 2018 primarily offering financial advice to startup founders and employees, has expanded into the tax advisory space and raised a $17 million extension to its Serie...
Venture capital is sometimes called a sales job by folks in the industry, as investors have to pitch LPs to raise their own funds and then pitch founders to pick their check over other offered term...
These days we have a ton of geospatial data coming off the increasing numbers of satellites circling in our atmosphere, but it takes some serious processing power and engineering prowess to turn th...
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late-stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago. Following this round, the com...
Using the large cloud computing providers is convenient, but not exactly cheap. Ubicloud, a new startup founded by the team behind Citus Data, which Microsoft acquired in 2019, wants to change the ...
Georgina Merhom developed the concept for SOLO after helping freelancers in Egypt who didn’t have bank accounts.
The company launched its payments orchestration product in 2022 and provides over 300 payment methods with fraud-detection capabilities, one-click checkout and advanced smart routing technology.
With the news that “mini organs” have been grown for the first time using human stem cells, this futuristic area of bio-medicine is clearly accelerating by leaps and bounds. However, harvesting ste...
As remote work becomes increasingly prevalent, organizations globally are adapting, especially regarding onboarding procedures for new employees and navigating cross-border payment complexities. Th...
HR startup Deel said it is acquiring Africa’s PaySpace in a deal that marks its largest acquisition to date.
When you think about commerce platforms, chances are the first names that come to mind are big names like Adobe Commerce or Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Large companies processing millions of orders ...
Australian remote sensing startup Esper wants to capture hyperspectral imagery from space at a fraction of the price of its competitors. The company, which will launch its first demonstration satel...
AI startup Anthropic, backed by Google and hundreds of millions in venture capital (and perhaps soon hundreds of millions more), today announced the latest version of its GenAI tech, Claude. And th...
Got the passion and the know-how, and want to make a difference in tech? Then mark your calendars for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 happening in San Francisco from October 28–30. We’re on the looko...
This time on Equity, we talk through Apple’s massive fine in the EU, India’s new rules for AI, Waymo’s wins, and Salla’s huge pre-IPO round.
Tourism continues to bounce back in the wake of COVID-19, with 2023 raking in $2.23 trillion globally, surpassing pre-pandemic levels for the first time since 2020. That’s having a big knock-...
Topsort develops retail media technology for small businesses to use auctions as a way to create effective advertising.
Qatar unveiled its startup investment program at the recent Web Summit through its development bank. The program aims to attract seed and growth-stage tech companies seeking to establish or expand ...
Wagely, a fintech out of Indonesia, made a name for itself with earned wage access: a way for workers in Southeast Asian countries to get advances on their salaries without resorting to higher-inte...
Camshaft disclosed in court filings this week that some $533 million it managed for Byju’s Alpha, a U.S. unit of Indian edtech group Byju’s, was transferred to another 100% and U.S.-bas...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! Apologies for being out last week — a cold got the best of me, but I’m back and here to talk about the fact that shutting down startups is ...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is ou...
We are thrilled to collaborate with some of the most influential players in the startup ecosystem to craft an exceptional experience at TC Early Stage 2024. Our aim is to equip new and aspiring fou...
Rabbit co-founder and CEO Jesse Lyu isn’t afraid of death … the death of the company, at least. He told TechCrunch that the company is a startup whose fortunes may be swayed by the whims of m...
The current-generation AI technology is the tech equivalent of a toddler, and all the mediocre reviews various GenAI software is getting is tantamount to judging a fish by its ability to climb a tr...
A 2021 study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78% of fruit production, 54% of vegetable production, and 32% of cereal production. At the same time, the way pesticides ar...
Groq, a startup developing chips to run generative AI models faster than conventional hardware, has an eye toward the enterprise — and public sector. Today, Groq announced that it’s for...
Given that this week Instagram revealed that it was developing a “Friend Map” feature, it was interesting and timely to run into a startup during Mobile World Congress that plans to go beyond even ...
In the midst of CommandBar’s pretty slim pitch deck, there are some innovations that are worth shining a light on.
A travel-focused startup that the COVID pandemic could have killed has instead thrived. TravelJoy, a company providing a suite of tools for travel entrepreneurs and travel business operators, is no...
Welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Join us as we dig through the most critical stories from the week.
Park and recreation organizations help communities thrive. However, many of them use outdated systems that make program registration stressful for residents, potentially leading to lost revenue for...
Everyone has heard of minimum viable products (MVPs), early versions of a future startup’s product that contains precisely what it needs to deliver value — and nothing more. The tricky ...
Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander officially lost power today after spending seven days on the moon. The lander made history for being the first American hardware to reach the lunar surface si...
This week, Dom spoke with Ariel Kaye, the founder of the home lifestyle brand Parachute.
Over the past couple of years, Nvidia, by far the largest AI chipmaker, has ramped up its investments in startups that propel it deeper into the AI space. According to S&P Global and Crunchbase...
If secondary buyers aren’t buying shares at more than a $5 billion valuation, it wouldn’t be wise for Reddit to price its IPO above that.
A startup that aims to combine the ticket-buying experience online with a social network, EQ Tickets, is today emerging out of stealth to help make discovering shows and other live events a more so...
A team led by former Twitter engineers is rethinking how AI can be used to help people process news and information. Particle.news, which entered into private beta over the weekend, is a new startu...
As streaming apps and services are gradually showing more ads to viewers, adtech startup Vibe plans to help small businesses take advantage of that trend by letting them access that ad inventory wi...
As part of the new fund, Inspired Capital wrote a manifesto that highlights how the venture capital firm thinks, what it believes in and what it is looking for.
Looking to make a splash at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024? Our Side Events initiative is a fantastic opportunity to engage with Boston’s tech community in a dynamic and memorable manner. Plus, ...
Bfree, a tech-enabled debt collection startup based in Nigeria, was founded to automate and introduce ethical debt recovery processes after its founders witnessed the use and adverse effects of agg...
Paris-based cybersecurity startup Filigran is capitalizing on the success of OpenCTI to build a suite of open source threat management products. That’s why the company recently raised €15 million (...
Emerging decentralized social network and X rival Bluesky has just landed a notable former Twitter leader as its new head of Trust and Safety. On Wednesday, the company announced it has appointed A...
Finding people who share your active passion — to go hiking, biking, running, whatever — is a pretty enduring problem. Existing friends and family aren’t always going to be into the same sporty pur...
Shader aims to challenge industry heavyweights like Snap’s AR development platform Lens Studio and TikTok’s Effect House, with its no-code AR creation tool that generates custom effects, 2D m...
Anamorph, a new filmmaking and technology company, announced its launch today. The startup, founded by filmmaker Gary Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes, wants to reshape the cinematic experi...
Wearables are coming in an increasing array of shapes, form factors and guises these days as health and fitness tracking proliferates. Here at 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow we spotted a new one: A stic...
Payments infrastructure giant Stripe said today it has inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $65 billion valuation. Notably, th...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. This is our Wednesday show, focused on startup and venture capital news that matters.
A new product for startups resulted in some big business coming Coverdash’s way, including new distribution partners and customer growth.
Update: Qilimanjaro was chosen as the winner and awarded €20,000. Long ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically named...
SambaNova, an AI chip startup that’s raised over $1.1 billion in VC money to date, is gunning for OpenAI — and rivals — with a new generative AI product geared toward enterprise c...
Black Tech Nation Ventures launched in 2021 to address the funding gap for Black founders amid a wave of venture diversity initiatives after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Three years later, a...
Pitches are critical in the quest for funding and first customers. It’s rare, however, for innovators to get truly candid insight on their pitches before stepping in front of VCs. Here’...
In one of the VC world’s greatest ironies, investors have lately been clamoring to back startups that are helping other startups shut down. So whether a VC-backed startup is succeeding or shu...
Biotech startup SynFlora brought an enticing pitch for a new type of skin treatment technology to 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, a spin-off out of Pompeu Fab...
Lizcore, a sport tracking startup out of Barcelona, caught our eye on the 4YFN show floor at MWC this week. It’s done what this climber — frankly — thought impossible: Come up wit...
Over the last decade, we’ve seen data grow in increasing importance to enterprise software, and that role has grown even more pronounced more recently with the rise of large language models. At the...
For obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a l...
As generative AI continues to dominate the headlines, it’s hard sometimes to find actual working business use cases among the hype. Writer is a San Francisco startup that is working to create gener...
Our founder-focused summit, TechCrunch Early Stage, is back in Boston on April 25! And we are looking for some incredible volunteers to help us make this event happen. If you are interested in find...
It can cost a fortune in 2024 to find an analogue camera, buy film (and maybe special batteries) for it and take pictures that then need to be paid for to be developed. Yet the experience had a cha...
Zacua, which has a regional presence in San Francisco, Madrid, Mexico and Singapore, is targeting startups addressing sustainability, productivity and urbanization.
GenAI has its issues. But if there’s one thing it excels at, it’s surfacing answers from vast pools of data. Enter Glean, whose software connects to enterprise first- and third-party da...
Yesterday, Mistral AI, a Paris-based AI startup working on foundational models, announced a new large language model that could rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, a chat assistant and a distribution partnership...
Recurring revenue is pretty much the holy grail for any business — it’s precisely why Apple has segued toward being almost as much a services company as it is a hardware company, with 2...
Shadowfax, one of the largest logistics service providers to hyper-local and on-demand delivery businesses in India, has raised $100 million in a new funding round as it clocks a yearly growth of 3...
The company draws heavily on drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry and has a deal with Google to provide carbon-free power.
Today we talked about how Google wants to bring AI to its mobile ecosystem, why investing in Europe is easier said than done, and the big earnings week ahead.
Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI is gradually building an alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic as its latest announcement shows. The company is launching a new flagship large language model called ...
Darwin AI’s system that connects with a company’s customer relationship management tool and evaluates possible sales leads and escalates the ones, most likely to buy, to a human salesperson.
A few months ago, OpenAI launched the GPT Store, a marketplace where people can create and list AI-powered chatbots customized to perform a number of tasks (e.g., coding, answering trivia questions...
The co-founders of Israeli food tech startup Ingrediome say they are inventing better-tasting lab-grown protein that’s up to 10 times less expensive to produce.
Interview Kickstart, a profitable startup helping tech professionals acquire career-advancing skills, has raised $10 million in its maiden funding from Blume Ventures, the companies said on Monday....
While North American VCs can see the potential value in backing European startups, it hasn’t been easy for firms to launch strategies.
Welcome to the very last issue of The Exchange! With TechCrunch+ sunsetting this month, The Exchange column and its newsletter are also coming to an end. Thank you for reading, emailing, tweeting, ...
Weekend team, we have something both short and sweet for you: A dig into the Reddit IPO filing.
Byju Raveendran, the founder of eponymous edtech group Byju’s, told employees on Saturday that he continues to remain the chief executive of the startup and that rumors of his firing have bee...
Well-known accelerator group Techstars announced a slew of changes to its operations this week, including the shuttering of some of its city-based programs.
Criticism from former members of...
Earlier this week, accelerator group Techstars announced changes to its operations. But what was planned internally to be an exciting new chapter for the organization ended up being somewhat of a P...
A court filing in the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against Google over its alleged monopoly in the search market has revealed a few notable tidbits about the state of the search market c...
House staging is a significant part of the real estate industry, and while Realtors have traditionally staged houses physically before posting a listing, it’s an expensive and time-consuming ...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Rivian launched with a promise to revoluti...
Act quickly, entrepreneurs! The clock is ticking on your chance to seize a scorching deal: TechCrunch Disrupt is returning to San Francisco from October 28–30, and the 2-for-1 ticket offer ends ton...
The Equity crew is covering deals of the week from PermitFlow, Cake and Match Group, Klarna’s board, and which startups could be 2024’s winners.
This weekend marks exactly two years since Russia’s illegal, unprovoked and brutal invasion of Ukraine. Despite overwhelming odds and continued hiccups in the supplies of Western aid to fight off R...
A group of Byju’s investors on Friday voted to remove the edtech group’s founder and chief executive Byju Raveendran and separately filed an oppression and management suit against the l...
Spend enough time online, and you’ll collect a digital paper trail of accounts, logins, subscriptions, mailing lists and passwords wrapped up in data breaches. A new startup called Yorba can ...
We’re announcing an exciting addition to our speaker lineup for StrictlyVC Los Angeles on February 29. Jesse Lyu, founder and CEO of rabbit Inc., will be joining us and showcasing rabbit r1, ...
After years of copying and pasting shopping links into spreadsheets and taking screenshots of products to share with her friends and family, Kristine Locker finally decided to launch a social shopp...
Hellohive announced on Thursday a $3.4 million Series A round to help combat discrimination during the hiring process.
Golden Ventures’ fifth fund targets seed-stage founders working across technologies, including AI, climate, blockchain and quantum.
Massive training datasets are the gateway to powerful AI models — but often, also those models’ downfall. Biases emerge from prejudicial patterns concealed in large datasets, like pictu...
The New York-based startup collects data via profile attributes specified by the brand in order to personalize the homepage, product description pages, emails and SMS.
Zūm Rails manages the flow of money by verifying a customer’s identity, linking directly with bank accounts and facilitating payments via the method of the customer’s choosing.
On today’s episode, we’re talking about Reddit’s upcoming IPO (again), along with some impressive raises for edtech startup Loora, Bioptimus and Dili.
When IT was responsible for servers onsite, understanding what you owned and where it lived was not a big problem. For most, it was physical machines in a closet or server room, but as infrastructu...
Back in 2016, Netflix open sourced Conductor, its microservices orchestration platform, but last December, it announced that it would discontinue maintaining it. Thankfully, for the many companies ...
Simetrik created the Simetrik Building Blocks, scalable and adaptable concepts based on no-code development and generative AI technologies.
While the world fixates on text-, image- and movie-generating AI, a startup headed by a former DeepMind senior researcher is developing GenAI tech to support the manufacturing of new physical mater...
Clairity is one of the latest entrants into the direct air capture market, where companies compete to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the lowest cost.
Sound can reveal a lot about water — and where it’s headed. Every washing machine cycle, dish rinse and toilet flush sends water rushing through the pipes in homes, apartments and comme...
Online interior design startup Havenly is acquiring artisan home décor startup The Citizenry, the company announced today. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Havenly says the acqui...
You voted and the results are finally in! We’re excited to announce that you chose Dana Louie, HubSpot’s Senior Manager of Corporate Development, as this year’s Audience Choice ro...
The buzziest AI today — GenAI — is an undoubted labor saver, generating images, emails, songs and more in record time. But one of AI’s more useful applications in the long run mig...
It’s a horrible truth that many women simply endure period pain every month — perhaps relying on painkillers or a hot water bottle to relieve stomach cramps. For others, menstrual pain ...
Of the professions in danger of being replaced by AI, language teacher is certainly up there. That’s not necessarily because it’s a good idea. AI, some employers have decided — in...
Byju’s says its recently launched $200 million rights issue has been fully subscribed, but the startup’s founder urged some of its major investors to participate amid a rift between the...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Shan-Lyn Ma, the co-founder and CEO of Zola, an online platform for wedding planning and g...
The potential sale of MariaDB to K1 Investment Management for $37 million is a capstone on the failed era of SPAC mergers.
There’s a new generative AI startup based in Paris. But what makes Bioptimus interesting is that it plans to apply everything we’ve collectively learned about AI models over the past few years with...
As winter continues to grip much of the world, here’s some hot news for entrepreneurs to thaw the chill: TechCrunch Disrupt will be back in San Francisco from October 28–30. Even better, tick...
Crypto prices are up, Planity has raised a hefty Series C, TikTok is in trouble again, and there’s a slew of M&A in Startup Land.
Whenever you go to a conference, whether as a sales and marketing exercise, or an executive is speaking, there is a cost associated with that. For the former, it involves the cost of space and a bo...
Meati is another example of a tech company making layoffs that didn’t appear to be in trouble.
1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount. According to 1Password ...
Sometimes, to move fast you don’t need to break things — you just need to acquire them. So it is with Nuview, a startup aiming to map the world from space using lidar, which announced today its acq...
Bluestein Ventures targets consumer-facing technology across the food supply chain like health and wellness, proprietary foodtech, commerce and digital technology.
OpenBorder provides e-commerce merchants with instant access to the $2 trillion cross-border market through automation of certain logistical needs.
If you’ve ever traveled in rural areas in France, you may have realized a French peculiarity. Even in the seemingly less-populated towns, there’s a hair salon. French startup Planity has been takin...
In a role reversal, Xalts, a Singapore fintech startup founded 18 months ago, has acquired Contour Network, a digital trade platform set up by eight major banks including HSBC, Standard Chartered a...
Techtaka, a South Korean online shopping fulfillment startup that provides third-party logistics services for e-commerce sellers, has raised $9.5 million (12.6 billion KRW) in a Series B round of f...
MariaDB is the subject of another potential takeover bid, as the company behind the eponymous open source relational database management system (RDBMS) confirmed it had received a provisional offer...
Stephanie Song, formerly on the corporate development and ventures team at Coinbase, was often frustrated by the volume of due diligence tasks she and her team had to complete on a daily basis. ...
The company made advancements in its proprietary dairy seed system to leverage interactions between recombinant dairy casein and native plant proteins, with or without improved fatty acid profiles....
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we’re looking at a new finance-based dating app, Robinhood’s earnings results and the startup in which PayPal Ventures mad...
Few categories are as ripe for automation-fueled disruption as construction. The industry is valued at around $2 trillion a year, in the U.S. alone. Much of that work is strenuous, repetitive and s...
Leveraging resources such as virtual data rooms and shared labs makes it easier for biotech startups to grow. This is good news: We need more companies attacking cancer from novel angles.
Groover offers a platform for independent musicians to connect with music curators and be able to better promote themselves.
Video game startups weren’t immune to recent market pressures, but the industry heads into 2024 on better footing than some sectors.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I’m having one of those weeks where I’m ju...
The Equity crew is highlighting deals of the week, YC’s new call for startups, Foundry Group’s exit, and venture capital’s year of transition.
Equals’ Series A deck certainly looks good, and it does a ton of things well. But there are a few areas where it can do better. Let’s take a look!
Atlas is developing a work benefits tool for global companies to manage their contractor benefits from one place.
Ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Anthropic, the well-funded AI startup, is testing a technology to detect when users of its GenAI chatbot ask about political topics and redirect those ...
The company’s fermentation process involves the cultivation of multiple microorganisms, including mycelium, to provide nutrition, flavor and texture.
Over the past few decades, extreme weather events have not only become more severe, but are also occurring more frequently. Neara is focused on enabling utility companies and energy providers to cr...
Notifications may seem like a solved problem. You’re probably getting more than you want already, after all. The two founders of Knock, Sam Seely and Chris Bell, argue that while a lot of com...
It doesn’t take much to get GenAI spouting mistruths and untruths. This past week provided an example, with Microsoft’s and Google’s chatbots declaring a Super Bowl winner before ...
Launched in 2020, SocialCrowd is a SaaS platform that provides performance management software.
This week Becca and Dom are joined by Tigran Sloyan, the co-founder and CEO of skills assessment platform CodeSignal.
The startup is relying on automation to speed design and quoting of residential heat pump installations.
Sequoia Capital plans to fund up to three open source software developers annually, as a continuation of a program it debuted last year. The Silicon Valley venture capital firm announced the Sequoi...
Back in the 90s, the notion of knowledge management was born, the idea that there is corporate memory locked inside employees, who know the ins and outs of various systems. The problem was recordin...
Today is the electrifying conclusion for TechCrunch Early Stage Audience voting! We’ve meticulously sifted through a plethora of applications from seasoned founders and luminaries in the star...
The material could drastically improve the durability of existing fuel cell designs while also improving the efficiency of hydrogen production by 15%-20%.
API company Kong is launching its open source AI Gateway, an extension of its existing API gateway that allows developers and operations teams to integrate their applications with one or more large...
There’s a lot that can go wrong with GenAI — especially third-party GenAI. It makes stuff up. It’s biased and toxic. And it can run afoul of copyright rules. According to a recent...
The indoor farming startup uses repurposed warehouse robots to grow produce for Amazon Fresh.
Immersion, a company specializing in haptic feedback tech, has settled a lawsuit with Meta over the latter’s use of touch-feedback in its Quest VR headsets. In a press release, Immersion said...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to our Wednesday show, in which we talk through t...
One of the big problems companies face as they try to use data to solve business problems has been the lag between the time the data comes in and when it’s actually useful for applications. In othe...
Spatial computing, climate tech and applications of AI technology join the newly announced list of startup incubator Y Combinator’s newest request for startups, announced on Wednesday. In a b...
Bold provides low-cost payment terminals, called dataphones, that enable small and medium businesses to accept link payments.
KTrust, a Tel Aviv–based security startup, is taking a different approach to Kubernetes security from many of its competitors in the space. Instead of only scanning Kubernetes clusters and their co...
The London-based wellness brand is tapping into functional mushrooms and nootropics to create a line of powder blends that it touts enhances energy, relaxation, mood and general well-being.
Roam, an EV startup based in Kenya, has raised $24 million in a Series A round, including up to $10 million debt commitment from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), to sca...
Foundry Group, an 18-year-old venture firm with nearly $3.5 billion in assets under management, has quietly decided to shut down and not raise any more funds. The move was unexpected considering th...
Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, it doesn’t always go as planned — particularly when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey from Electric Cloud, 58% of develo...
Phantom, a crypto wallet heavily used in the Solana ecosystem, has seen its user base more than triple over the past year.
There are quite a few apps that let you log the movies, TV shows and books that you have watched and read. Some of them are indie apps that take advantage of various online databases. Some of them,...
A Y Combinator-backed startup called Cambio is bringing AI to the banking world in a surprising way: It’s putting AI bots on the phone with companies and consumers. The startup began by offer...
FlowFi combines technology with financial experts to go beyond traditional bookkeeping to show founders essential non-GAAP financial metrics.
Seal Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded by a group of former members of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $7.4 million seed funding...
TechCrunch Early Stage returns to Boston on April 25, 2024, and the agenda for our flagship founder event is almost complete. We’re excited to share this not-so-sneaky sneak peek at some of the fan...
Finom, a European challenger bank aimed at SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and freelancers, has raised €50 million ($54 million) in a Series B equity round of funding. Founded out of the ...
Bob W, a marketplace for premium short-term apartment rentals, has raised €40 million ($43 million) in a Series B round of funding. Founded out of Finland in 2018, Bob W touts itself as a “te...
Venture capital firm Homebrew is targeting $50 million for a new fund, according to a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing comes as a bit of a surprise considerin...
Only 7% of founders have a pitch deck with a reasonably good go-to-market (GTM) narrative. Given that a lot of founders are raising money to acquire new customers, allow me to put words to what tha...
Wingman Ventures is seeking the best of Switzerland’s startups, and its diverse portfolio already ranges from mobile commerce to robotics. The Zurich-based venture capital firm, which focuses...
Get ready for an exciting lineup at TechCrunch Early Stage — happening on April 25 in the lively city of Boston, Massachusetts. We’ve gone through a bunch of applications from experienced fou...
This morning, we have an interesting mix of stories that bring technology, politics and AI together in unique ways that’s well worth diving deep into
You must have at least a 675 credit score to use it.
After recent launches in the United Kingdom and Ireland, workforce management platform Rippling is continuing its ambitious international expansion with the opening of its Asia-Pacific headquarters...
Travel startup Layla — backed by firstminute capital, M13, Booking.com co-founder Andy Phillipps, Skyscanner co-founder Barry Smith and Paris Hilton — said today that it has acquired AI-powered iti...
Ilara Health, a Kenya-based health tech enabling private clinics to access diagnostic devices and pharmaceutical products, has secured $4.2 million debt-equity in a pre-Series A round. The funds wi...
To understand what’s happening with seed rounds in 2024, TechCrunch+ spoke with three seasoned investors who offered advice for founders looking to raise.
Tech’s ability to reinvent the wheel can mean ignoring truths that others have learned. But new founders are sometimes figuring it out for themselves faster than predecessors.
Kai Kloepfer started biometric “smart” gun startup Biofire as a science fair project after the Aurora, Colorado, mass shooting in 2012 brought the U.S.’s gun violence problem close to h...
We’ve finally had our mittens on Apple’s face-wearable computer. And, what can we say, it’s pretty astonishing.
Papaya Global bought a Super Bowl ad slot with the hope of the commercial driving brand recognition for the software company.
Xyte’s pitch deck has a lot of slides, but how much of it was actually useful? Let’s take a look.
20PRODUCT includes a group of eight people who come from companies like Shopify, Nubank, Spotify, Snap, LinkedIn, Ramp, Match and Xiaomi.
Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
Odyssey’s products tap into the health benefits of Lions Mane and Cordyceps mushrooms to produce an energy drink that provides cognitive clarity and focus.
Software asset management — enterprise IT aiming, in part, to help companies save money — continues to draw a lot of money itself. In the latest development, Xensam, a startup out of St...
Could 2024 be the year for fintech IPOs? Quite possibly, according to F-Prime Capital’s State of Fintech 2024 report. F-Prime — a VC firm with over $4.5 billion in assets under management tha...
Upstash announced a $1.9 million seed round almost exactly two years ago, and an idea for building a serverless data platform for data-intensive applications built with Redis and Kafka. That doesn’...
Your phone’s camera is as much software as it is hardware, and Glass is hoping to improve both. But while its wild anamorphic lens creeps to market, the company (running on $9.3 million in ne...
Plaid has named Jennifer (Jen) Taylor, who most recently served as Cloudflare’s chief product officer, as its first president. The move is notable in that it comes just months after the fintech sta...
GenAI might be one of the most exciting technologies today. But it’s also one of the fastest-moving — posing a challenge for enterprises keen to deploy it. With each new GenAI innovatio...
The startup is betting that software can supplant manufacturing precision in its quest to deliver reliable, inexpensive fusion power.
Smart water bottle-maker Larq this week announced that it has been acquired by filtration giant, Brita. More specifically, Brita GmbH, the German company founded in 1966, which spun off and sold it...
Just like clockwork, Pennylane is raising another €40 million ($43 million at today’s exchange rate). This new funding round comes after the accounting startup raised €4 million in 2020, €15 millio...
Attentive.ai, a startup building vertical software for landscaping and construction services in the U.S., has raised $7 million in a new funding round as it looks to enhance its AI-led offerings an...
Under scrutiny from activists — and parents — OpenAI has formed a new team to study ways to prevent its AI tools from being misused or abused by kids. In a new job listing on its career...
It’s been almost 3 years since SEC commissioner Hester Peirce released her updated Token Safe Harbor Proposal 2.0, but she isn’t giving up.
This week, Sophie discusses a myriad of recent updates: The lottery will now be “1 person, 1 chance,” there are new filing fees, forms, software updates, and more.
We’re taking a deep look at a number of startup fundraisings, and the latest from the world of venture capital itself. Startups and capital, it’s our jam!
Transformers are everywhere on the electrical grid, and they’ll need new tech to realize the “internet of power.”
Job searching is a drag by any measure. Entering the same information into applications over and over even more so. It feels like a process that is ripe for a digital update, and Simplify, an early...
Fresh on the heels of its $40 million fundraise, streaming media company Plex is today announcing its expansion into a new business: a movie rentals storefront. The addition, which will initially b...
Polycam, an app that uses a smartphone’s sensors to capture 3D scans of objects, is raising cash from prominent investors, including Adobe and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. Polycam today an...
Just two years ago, VC funding to cybersecurity startups was on fire. Indeed, $23 billion flooded the sector, per Crunchbase. But in 2023, cybersecurity upstarts only saw a third of that — th...
It’s M&A season in a tough tech jobs market. This morning, Beamer, a Boulder, Colorado-based company developing tools for businesses to reach users through their apps (e.g. via push notif...
The Goodshuffle Pro includes a single dashboard for rental and event production companies to track inventory, automate sales and streamline growth from one place.
In another sign of the scramble to accelerate the uptake and transformative potential of artificial intelligence, Dutch recycling giant Bollegraaf Group is making a strategic investment in U.K. AI ...
Imagine you work for a car rental agency or a package delivery company and you’re in charge of a fleet of vehicles. If you’re switching to EV vehicles, it becomes more complex to manage your vehicl...
Adam Neumann, who co-founded flexible workspace provider WeWork in 2010 and notoriously stepped down nine years later, is attempting to buy the company out of bankruptcy, according to multiple repo...
This week Becca and Dom are joined by Beatrice Dixon, the CEO and co-founder of The Honey Pot.
Many of Latin America’s SaaS businesses outperform others at efficiency metrics, but capital scarcity also puts a limit to innovation, although AI could change that.
Everbridge’s deal shows that startups shouldn’t expect their valuations to be salvaged that much by cash generation if their growth is all but zero.
SUMA Wealth’s platforms have seen 62% annual user growth, while revenue increased nearly five times in the past year.
With greater literacy, focus, professional experience and a vision for the future, boards can position their businesses to thrive in this new era of AI.
Most internal bug fixing workflows are entirely disconnected from the activity that triggered the bug, consisting mostly of written reports from users. Jam’s founders wanted to change that by autom...
Argentine construction tech startup Nuqlea recently raised a $750,000 extension round led by construction-focused VC firm Foundamental.
Stellar Sleep’s mobile app taps into psychological methods to help users break the cycle of those frequent nights awake.
In the last year, the company introduced an artificial intelligence-powered ledger, offered business banking functions and built a new version of its bookkeeping app.
Ionix (formerly Cyberpion) helps enterprises reduce their attack surface by giving them a better view of their overall security posture and software supply chain across on-premises, cloud and third...
Remember the Chinese “spy” balloon from 2023? If not, here’s a refresher: About a year ago, a high-altitude balloon originating from China flew across American airspace largely un...
Nigerian online teaching platform Klas has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by Ingressive Capital, with participation from Techstars, HoaQ, and several angel investors. Founded in 2022 by ...
Early-stage European venture capital (VC) firm Episode 1 has closed its third fund at £76 million ($95 million), as the London-based investor turns to in-house “data-driven deal sourcing tool...
The recent surprise announcement that Meta will soon be shutting down its Facebook Groups API is throwing some businesses and social media marketers into disarray. On January 23, Meta announced the...
Weaveworks, a startup focusing on cloud native development tooling, announced today on LinkedIn that it would be shutting down, a sad day for any startup. “I am very sad to announce — officially — ...
Today, we take a look at the costs Yandex’s parent had to endure to exit from Russia, easing price movements in crypto, and some juicy venture fundraising.
I’ve spent a good bit of time talking about inventory on these pages. I’m always happy to spend a couple of paragraphs discussing far and away my least favorite part of working retail. The job is, ...
B2B and B2C, while believed to be stark opposites in many ways, are not purely categories of audiences.
Large AI models — the big troves of language, vision and audio data that power generative artificial intelligence services — are shaping up to be as significant in the development of AI...
Learn how to craft an email update that keeps investors engaged, communicates momentum, and garners support on your journey.
Wonder Ventures is the latest to inject additional capital at the pre-seed stage, an area where general partner Dustin Rosen and other investors continue to be bullish.
In 2023, the global frenzy around artificial intelligence, fueled by the advent of ChatGPT, swept across the world. In China, where OpenAI’s chatbot is unavailable, startups and tech incumben...
Food waste is a major problem. In the U.S. alone, roughly 30% to 40% of the supply ends up in landfills. A United Nations report estimated that around one-third of the world’s food is wasted ...
Naboo, a French company that was created just a couple of years ago, is trying to create a modern online experience for company seminar planning. The startup recently raised an $8 million funding r...
A survey of TechCrunch readers reveals that while the spot ETFs may boost bitcoin’s price, they may not be attracting many people who don’t own bitcoin.
VCs have long supported fast-fashion companies but the controversies and lawsuits they draw makes them riskier investments.
As AI’s presence in our lives increases, so does the number of diverse founders leveraging it to develop positive, socially impactful services and products.
A stealth startup led by ex-Blue Origin leaders, focused on harvesting resources from the moon, has quietly closed a sizable new tranche of funding, according to regulatory documents. Interlune, a ...
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Garry Tan heads up Y Combinator, the most ...
This week, we’re taking a look at what PhageLab got right in this pitch deck and why it could use some judicious pruning.
Today, we’re going over Zum’s $140M round, why Ramp is on an acquisition spree, and how the tech layoff season simply refuses to fade away.
Upskilling is more than just a remedy for skill shortages. It is a strategic long-term investment and will help cultivate a dynamic, adaptable workforce.
Niremia Collective intends to provide capital and management resources to high-growth well-being startups as well as incubate new businesses.
Following months of behind-the-scenes conflict, Byju’s and some of its biggest investors are now publicly airing their complaints about one another. Byju’s, once India’s most valu...
Last week, at our first StrictlyVC evening of the year, prominent AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo joined us in San Francisco to talk about how they think about AI investing in a world where dea...
Activist investors are coming for Etsy. Elliott Management, the investment management firm known for its aggressive governance tactics, has built a roughly 13% position in Etsy’s stock, CNBC ...
Probabl isn’t your average AI startup, as this new French company is an Inria spin-off company that revolves around an open source data science library called scikit-learn — Inria is a well-known F...
Skyflow CEO and co-founder Anshu Sharma joins Equity to discuss Apple’s Vision Pro and how it fares against the Innovator’s Dilemma.
The startup is developing a proprietary method that enables bacteria to “breathe without oxygen” inside a bioreactor.
Construction tech founders should consider how their products can serve construction and real estate customers.
A not-so-humble brag here, so brace yourself. The programming at TechCrunch Early Stage — April 25 in Boston, Massachusetts — is gonna be off the proverbial hook. How do we know? We read hundreds o...
A small U.K. startup that combined a school bus service with a software platform to safeguard pupils has been acquired by “smart buses” startup Zeelo, which last year raised a $14 milli...
A group of large investors in Byju’s has called for an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) where they seek to change the leadership at Byju’s days after the edtech group launched a righ...
There’s an acute shortage of radiologists around the world, which means it is harder for medical teams to get imaging studies done. As a result, more than 200 companies have sprung up to create app...
Planet A Foods uses fermentation technology to turn all-natural, locally-sourced ingredients, for example, oats and sunflower seeds, into its cocoa-free chocolate brand, ChoViva.
They say don’t shoot the messenger, but what if The Messenger shoots itself? Media startup The Messenger burst on the scene last May with $50 million in hand, aggressively hiring journalists ...
It’s not hard to spot the human pain in the market today.
Securing generative AI-based applications from prompting attacks, ensuring that they don’t leak sensitive data or create malicious output or results that may violate privacy regulations is be...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
Metronome, a startup that helps software companies offer usage-based billing, has raised $43 million in a Series B funding round led by NEA. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalys...
Meet Twin Labs, a Paris-based startup that wants to build an automation product for repetitive tasks, such as onboarding new employees to all your internal services, reordering items when you’re ru...
Finvest is out to make the purchase, management and selling of U.S. Treasury Bills seamless, while also offering a high-yield cash management account with a 4.4% yield.
Today on Equity, Plex targets profitability, Rebellions aims to take on Nvidia and Nile is building a new data system for SaaS.
Pitch competitions are a bright spot for underrepresented founders but not without burdens that regular funding doesn’t have.
StreamAlive, an audience engagement application for livestreams, virtual meetings and in-person events, secured $1.58 million in pre-seed funding, the company announced today. From webinars, livest...
Data has always been at the heart of every program, and even more so these days as data feeds machine learning and large language models, but connecting to those databases has been a constant strug...
Owner recently tapped into AI technology for its new email marketer feature that produces an email in the restaurant owner’s style and tone.
Vienna-based early-stage VC Speedinvest has closed its fourth early-stage fund, Speedinvest 4, at €350 million (around $380 million at today’s exchange rate), surpassing the initial goal of €...
Accel, an early investor in Indian e-commerce giants Flipkart and Myntra, is preparing a new fashion e-commerce bet in India even as competition intensifies with the recent expansion of Mukesh Amba...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups.
Spend management startup Ramp has acquired AI-powered startup Venue as it expands its procurement offering. Venue was founded in 2022 by TK Kong, Young Kim, and Kevin Chan, and its aim was to “simp...
Building a solid rulebook around AI policies in the workplace now can help prevent plenty of headaches in the future.
Swedish medical device startup Acorai is pairing proprietary sensing hardware and machine learning software with the goal of putting a non-invasive heart pressure monitoring tool in the hands of cl...
The SaaS startup, which provides software to solar installers, reportedly missed its growth targets for the past year.
What makes startups more likely to succeed is the quality of the team, their ability to execute, and their sense of timing.
Today is demo day at Alchemist Accelerator, which focuses on very early stage startups from technical founders. Fifteen companies are presenting in this batch, but here are several we thought worth...
GPUs’ ability to perform many computations in parallel make them well-suited to running today’s most capable AI. But GPUs are becoming tougher to procure, as companies of all sizes increase their i...
In the midst of a wave of tech industry layoffs, it’s heartening to see some startups succeeding despite the dour market outlook. Kore.ai, a company developing enterprise-focused conversation...
Startup p0 is named after catastrophic events that can cause a platform to crash, leading to potential security breaches and loss of customer trust in businesses. Those are the problems that p0 was...
Meet BlueLayer, a new European startup that is building a software platform specifically designed for carbon project developers. In particular, BlueLayer wants to help these companies manage their ...
A new Germany-based startup, Semron, is developing what it describes as “3D-scaled” chips to run AI models locally on smartphones, earbuds, VR headsets and other mobile devices. Co-crea...
Fidelity has cut the value of its holding in Meesho by 33.6% since the original investment, giving the Indian social commerce startup a valuation of $3.25 billion. Adjusted for outstanding shares, ...
Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that recently raised $22 million, is launching a new vertical focused on improving the healthcare system. Julien Méraud, a senior team member of the French unic...
Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, said today it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) in a Series B round of funding to develop its third AI chip, called Rebel. The startup wi...
Media streamer Plex has raised new capital. The company, which began as a media organization startup, has morphed over the years to become a one-stop shop for all your media, including ad-supported...
Reddit’s feeling out its own IPO valuation is crucial, especially given that hightened regulatory scrutiny is restricting M&A as an exit avenue for unicorns.
What worked for PayPal is a good example of how your startup can start looking for its best routes to market, too.
Cap VC is launching a tool for VC firms, and is planning to expand its offering to startups raising money. The idea is to make better investment decisions, faster, using the power of AI. VC is a pe...
Today, we’re talking about Arc’s new mobile app vs. Google search; why Reddit’s IPO might finally happen; why Meta :heart: Apple; and… what Garry said.
Amazon has ended its bid to acquire iRobot, the maker of robotic vacuums, after running up against headwinds with European regulators. Amazon and iRobot have opted to mutually terminate their previ...
Let’s face it — the job market is tough. Between all of the layoffs in the tech industry and new job positions being created to leverage the artificial intelligence boom, company compensation teams...
In 2021, Oleg Klimov, Vlad Guber and Oleg Kiyashko set out to co-create a platform, Refact.ai, that could convince more companies to embrace GenAI for coding by affording users more customization &...
While running a bar in Melbourne, Katy Barfield was taken aback by the large amount of ingredients thrown out at the end of each day. After doing some research, she realized that Australia produces...
Byju’s, the world’s most valuable edtech startup, has cut its valuation ask by 99% in a rights issue it launched Monday as the Indian firm scrambles to meet its liabilities and operatio...
Garry Tan, whose success in Silicon Valley has likely inspired many of the founders he mentors, is once again attracting attention for his posts on the social platform X. On Friday night, the Y Com...
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! In this edition, I’m going to look at Brex’s latest round of layoffs, the state of fintech investing in 2023 and more! I may be taking some...
Enterprises need to understand how much to budget into AI tools, how to weigh the benefits of AI vs. new recruits, and how to ensure their training is on point.
Some thoughts on AI aesthetics, the challenge of uninsurability, and how to pitch a biotech startup to non-experts.
Boomerang thinks so. It uses machine learning to match photos and descriptions of lost items to streamline the lost and found process.
We’re back to dig into Q4 2023 venture capital results and what’s coming up this year.
Flexport, a logistics company with $2.7 billion in funding, is reportedly planning additional layoffs.
Apple is on a roll when it comes to having its hand forced by state entities and governing bodies: Alternative payment methods, stripping features from existing hardware, allowing alternate app sto...
Now that 2023 is in our rearview mirror, the startup winter is behind us, but we’re not quite out of the woods yet.
Tick tock, it’s now o’clock. You have less than one day left to get your ticket to TechCrunch Early Stage — April 25 in Boston — at the lowest price. Do your budget and your startup dream a solid: ...
Doola’s pitch deck does a few things extremely well, but the problem is, it leaves a ton out, too. Here’s why that won’t work for most startups.
January has thus far seen 23,670 known tech layoffs, sourced from 85 known reductions, and hitting tech shops big and small.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today was somethi...
Buyers are scrutinizing purchases more and sellers are under pressure to provide value in every buyer interaction.
Kost aims to “be the best co-investor in Europe” and work with food tech and generalist investors looking for a firm with scale-up expertise and food-specialized abilities.
Krutrim, an AI startup founded by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, said it has raised a funding round that values it at $1 billion. The startup, founded last year, is the fastest to become a unicorn i...
The company said the layoffs are part of a “reorganization of our corporate team to improve efficiencies and accelerate our path to profitability.”
Allianz Direct, a digital-first German subsidiary of the insurance giant, has acquired the French home insurance business of ailing insurtech Luko for €4.3 million (around $4.65 million).
Vancouver, Washington–based Digs, a collaboration platform that provides homebuilders, vendors and — eventually — homeowners with something akin to a digital twin of a home, today annou...
The partnership with meat and dairy producer Sigma Alimentos brings Chunk’s plant-based products to Latin America for the first time.
The software supply chain, which comprises the components, libraries and processes companies use to develop and publish software, is under threat. According to one recent survey, 88% of companies b...
Monitoring software and infrastructure in production, the practice known as observability is becoming increasingly harder — not easier. According to recent survey, 69% of developer operations...
Indian food delivery startup Swiggy is cutting about 400 jobs, or nearly 7% of its workforce, as the startup seeks to bring further improvements to its finances ahead of a planned IPO later this ye...
When TechCrunch first covered gift registry platform Thankful Registry eleven years ago, its philosophy was turning the act of asking for gifts into a mindful process, instead of a greedy grab for ...
Which startups are drawing the most praise from venture folks? A new list compiled by GGV US provides some hints.
Alinea Invest, a fintech app offering AI-powered wealth management aimed at Gen Z women, has $3.4 million in seed funding ahead of the launch of a virtual AI assistant that will help users with the...
As we dive in to the work of commercial space technology and startups, it’s important to start with an overview of some of the basics.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Ben Goodwin, the co-founder and CEO of Olipop, a soda startup making low-sugar pop with pr...
If you’re thinking about raising a Series A, you should probably start now.
Technology can sometimes move at the speed of light. And so, too, can technology executives. In a shock move, Web Summit announced today that Katherine Maher — who was hastily appointed to th...
There’s a reason why some people are die-hard Microsoft Outlook fans. It brings together your emails, your calendar events and your contacts in a single app. But . . . it’s Outlook. And some people...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is ou...
Deeploi, an “IT-as-a-service” startup for SMEs, has raised $6.5 million in a seed round of funding led by European VC Atomico. The one-year-old German startup serves to help companies r...
When Anomalo’s co-founders left Instacart in 2018, they thought they could put machine learning to work to solve data-quality problems inherent in large datasets. Five years later, the company’s id...
Businesses are moving faster than ever to use generative AI and bring it to both their employees and users. Moving fast and security don’t always go hand-in-hand, though, so it’s only n...
Data from various surveys show that there’s an exodus in academia where it concerns top AI talent — and where they end up.
With the acquisition comes a partnership between Fantuan and Chowbus that will meld each of their strengths with local Asian restaurants.
Mark Hay and Ethan Ding want to make every corporate decision a data-driven one. Ambitious? For certain. But the two engineers, who met a few years ago during the pandemic, are nothing if not optim...
While working at Hugging Face, engineers Mark McQuade and Brian Benedict ran into challenges helping enterprise customers adopt GenAI. Some companies didn’t want to use closed-source AI APIs ...
Elo Life is focused on a number of technologies from developing plant-based sweeteners to crop protection.
European Union lawmakers scrambling for the bloc to be a contender in the generative AI race are presenting a package of support measures aimed at charging up homegrown AI startups and scale ups. A...
Bilt Rewards, whose platform aims to allow consumers to earn rewards on rent and daily neighborhood spend, has raised $200 million at a $3.1 billion valuation, the company announced today. General ...
A fledgling Dutch startup wants to help companies extract data from large volumes of complex documents where accuracy and security is paramount — and it has just secured the backing of Google...
Just a year after raising $11.6 million, Kittl raised another $36 million in a Series B round led by IVP with some existing investors participating once again. The Berlin-based startup has been wor...
Aniai, a startup that has built a burger-grilling robot, Alpha Grill, said today it has raised $12 million, bringing its total raise to $15 million. The money will go toward launching its first man...
Forta Health aims to democratize access to healthcare by utilizing AI tools, including large language models, to empower caregivers and enhance clinical treatments.
Just tacking AI onto a product isn’t enough, and investors are hoping that the technology will lead to more innovation in the space.
Artisse, one of the many AI photo creation apps that let users generate photos of themselves using uploaded selfies combined with prompts, has raised $6.7 million in seed funding, following AI self...
Despite all the enthusiasm, there’s a niggling detail that deserves our attention: AI startups often have worse economics than most software startups.
Expense management startup Brex, which was valued at $12.3 billion two years ago, laid off 282 people, or about 20% of its staff today. The once high-flying fintech startup sent a note to employees...
It’s a wonder what generative AI, particularly text-to-image AI models like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, can do. From photorealism to cubism, image-generating models can translate ...
After securing your seed round, the race is on to scale ARR (annual recurring revenue). ARR is arguably the most critical startup metric founders need to understand and get right — especially if yo...
Clerk, a startup creating a suite of embeddable UIs, APIs and admin dashboards that app developers can use to authenticate and manage users, has raised $30 million in a Series B round led by CRV wi...
Balancing protective measures, like data protection protocols, with progressive strategies, such as AI-driven product rollouts, is essential.
Silicon Valley venture capital juggernaut Sequoia is backing a fledgling Danish startup to build a next-gen software composition analysis (SCA) tool, one that promises to help companies filter thro...
Qdrant, the company behind the eponymous open source vector database, has raised $28 million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital. Founded in 2021, Berlin-based Qdrant is seeking to ...
Byju’s, once valued at $22 billion, is willing to cut its valuation to below $2 billion as it hunts for new funding, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The Bengaluru-headquart...
European VC Plural has carved out a reputation for itself as being one of the few VCs in the region started and led by entrepreneurs who grew their own startups. Its founders include Taavet Hinriku...
It would be shortsighted to overlook edtech amid the present downturn, especially now that AI is disrupting nearly every industry out there.
Like a tenacious balloon, no matter how hard crypto gets knocked down, it tends to float back up again. But the current crypto bust looks a bit different.
The Q4 2023 earnings cycle will kick off this week with names like Intel and Visa reporting. The largest tech companies will start to report next week.
Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks. It means innovating without fear of failure, stepping into the unknown, and pursuing ambitious ideas.
There’s a lot of money in voice cloning. Case in point: ElevenLabs, a startup developing AI-powered tools to create and edit synthetic voices, today announced that it closed an $80 million Se...
Captain Fresh, a business-to-business harvest-to-retail marketplace for animal protein, is engaging with investors to raise up to $50 million in fresh funding, according to sources familiar with th...
Shamba Pride has since 2016 worked to enhance last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackle price exploitation and quality issues for farmers through its merchant network dubbed digishops. The ...
Covering companies’ growth from the seed stage gives reporters a glimpse of what investors must feel like.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. The startup train just keeps on rumblin’ d...
The pendulum swung hard in the direction of B2B startups over the last decade — but the thing with pendulums is that eventually they swing back.
Startups are in a difficult spot. But the good news is that some untraveled and overgrown exit paths have a chance of opening up this year.
Want a huge jumpstart on your startup dream? This is no time to procrastinate. We have only seven days left of launch pricing to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, taking place in Boston on April 25. Buy...
This week, we’re taking a look at a pitch deck from Rypplzz (pronounced “ripples”), a spatial technology startup that recently raised $3 million.
Media streamer Plex’s long-delayed plans to launch a marketplace for TV and movie rentals are finally being realized after multiple false starts. The media startup originally announced its pl...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Frida...
Angel investors and investment groups that fund BIPOC entrepreneurs must remain committed to keeping vital early-stage capital flowing.
Myrealtrip is the latest travel tech company to ride a growing post-pandemic tourism industry. The Seoul-based startup said today it has raised $56.7 million (75.6 billion KRW) in a Series F equity...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is ou...
Let’s make one thing clear: Reddit going public in the first quarter is not going to throw the IPO window wide open for other private tech companies.
Cowboy Ventures predicts that “given the hard shift to enterprise,” we can “hope and expect more exciting consumer unicorns will be born in coming years.”
Last week, Artifact, a buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced it was shutting down after failing to gain critical mass. The news came as a surprise, as the app was generally w...
What does it take to raise your first round of funding? That’s just one of the many topics that will be featured at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 on April 25 in Boston. At this daylong event, experie...
There are ways companies can better understand their customers’ pain points to develop the right products that solve the right problems at the right time.
At a time when many startups are struggling to raise funding or are raising but at lower valuations, it’s notable when companies raise at flat or higher valuations. Especially when their last raise...
Founded in 2007 to help IP and R&D professionals do their jobs more efficiently, Singapore-based Patsnap‘s first product was a global patent search database. Now it’s building out its sui...
Last year wasn’t the best year for crypto companies. According to PitchBook data, VC investments in crypto companies are down by 68% in 2023 compared to 2022. To be fair, crypto companies sti...
Agriculture is poised to be one of the next great robotics categories. Everyone needs to eat, and much of what we eat in this part of the world comes from large farms. Farm work is tough on the bod...
This is Getsafe’s second acquisition in a few months, after it nabbed the German portfolio of ailing French insurtech company Luko.
Orbital operations company Astroscale has revealed new details about its approach to refueling satellites in space, as part of a $25.5 million project exploring the concept with the Space Force. Th...
International Battery Company, a startup developing lithium-ion battery cells for electric vehicles, has raised $35 million as it plans to bridge the demand-supply gap in the growing EV market in I...
Cleveland-based electric motorcycle startup Land Moto is looking to diversify by powering up the battery design side of its tech, and has raised $3 million (on top of $7 million raised last summer)...
IT teams today have to juggle an enormous number of tools, apps and systems. The average company was using 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps as of 2022, according to Statista — a volume t...
In this week’s Ask Sophie column, Sophie explores immigration options for coming to the United States for customer discovery.
Electric boat startup Navier has landed the first official pilot program for its hydrofoiling watercraft, partnering with Stripe to bring passengers from San Francisco’s outskirts to the down...
Argentinian payments infrastructure startup Pomelo has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding. The Buenos Aires-based company started in 2021 with the goal of giving fintechs and embedde...
Bill Reichert Contributor Share on X Bill Reichert is partner and chief evangelist at Pegasus Tech Ventures. More posts by this contributor TAM takedown: Investors are looking for market opportunit...
This week, we’re digging into fundraises from Vertice, Electra, and Build a Rocket Boy, and what Thomvest plans to do with its new $250M fund.
If the pitches reaching my inbox are any indication, one of the hot new things in generative AI is “copilots” for cybersecurity. Microsoft has one. Google, too. So does Vicarius, the vu...
The fintech app addresses the first financial milestones for couples and grows with the relationship through planning, saving and spending features.
Despite the mixed recent news on inflation, capital’s still flowing healthily into Silicon Valley. Case in point, Top Tier Capital, the San Francisco-based VC and private equity firm, today a...
Dharmesh Singh and Bala Balabaskaran, once a part of Microsoft’s Office 365 team, headed up revenue operations and planning at Salesforce together for a number of years. While there, they say...
Build a Rocket Boy, a Scotland-headquartered game development company founded by one of the former lead developers behind the Grand Theft Auto franchise, today announced it has raised $110 million ...
When you say the phrase “expense management” in a business context, people might think of software like Concur that tracks what you spend on travel, entertainment and other work-related...
Gaining regulatory approval is a feat that has taken cultivated meat companies years to achieve.
Berlin-based banking startup N26 is rolling out a new stock and ETF trading feature starting with Austria as the first market. This product launch marks a renewed focus on the startup’s core market...
A new luxury goods e-commerce startup dubbed Long Story Short has a provocative concept: it’s $1,000 per month to join for the privilege of shopping its curated collection. Shocking as that s...
This week Becca and Dom are joined by Gabi Lewis, the co-founder and CEO of the cereal company Magic Spoon.
Startup magic doesn’t just happen. It takes talent, skill, experience, hard work and more. The same is true for creating TechCrunch Early Stage 2024, a world-class startup conference taking place o...
Do frontline workers — workers providing essential services like healthcare — use radios? They once did. But with the advent of affordable smartphones and service, radios have slowly, s...
The Apple-versus-Beeper saga is not over yet it seems, even though the iMessage-on-Android Beeper Mini was removed from the Play Store last week. Now, Apple customers who used Beeper’s apps a...
To survive, web3 startups must expand their buyer base to brand-new markets that showcase a greater willingness to spend, invest and innovate.
Onera Health, a startup providing sleep diagnostic and monitoring technology to help clinicians conduct studies, has raised €30 million ($32 million) in a Series C round of funding. Poor sleep is t...
Today on Equity, we’re taking a look at stocks around the world, key earnings and what’s happening with crypto.
Updated to note that Kuda has now responded to say that it didn’t close a bridge round last year. The story below is modified to reflect that. Earlier this month, Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogund...
London-based notetaking startup Goodnotes said today it is acquiring South Korean startup Dropthebit, which operates a meeting and video summary tool called Traw. With the acquisition, Goodnotes is...
After using Figma to create user interfaces and experiences, developers are left with the hefty task of coding the designs in order to create functional websites or apps. Locofy, a Singapore-based ...
Most VCs think valuations are close to the bottom, if not already there, but few think there will be any relief in 2024.
Moonshot startups are inherently about venturing into uncharted territory, giving us new superpowers and creating new markets.
Traditional success metrics like the Rule of 40 and Magic Number must be revised amid an unpredictable and competitive market.
As long as micro funds can be nimble enough to gain meaningful ownership, they shouldn’t be too concerned about Countdown’s fate.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! In this edition, I’m going to look at some hits and misses in the real estate fintech space, Carta’s missteps (again), and more! To get a r...
Rodrigo Fernandes Contributor Share on X Rodrigo Fernandes is a professor at Fundação Dom Cabral and is the CFO at Pingback, a Brazilian startup that provides a comprehensive solution for digital c...
CES was definitely worth watching closely, if only just for the rise of age tech.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is ou...
The basis of the co-sell GTM strategy is built on understanding the problem and debunking the most common myths of the partner experience.
We know your time is precious, so beginning next week, we’re going to make it a lot easier for you to read our best stuff.
Avoid the safety of ordinary products and aim for innovation and distinctiveness. Dare to be different and push boundaries.
In the depth of the pandemic, 500 or so backers chipped in to make Makera’s Carvera Kickstarter campaign, a fully automatic desktop CNC machine, hit its goal. Since then, the company has sold...
Artifact, the news aggregator-turned social network from Instagram’s founders, is shutting down. On Friday, the startup announced via a blog post it had made the decision to “wind down ...
The pitch deck video analytics firm Qortex used to raise its $10M seed round has a lot missing, but it does get some things right.
After a year of people throwing money at AI companies, investors are now looking for startups that are more solid and viable.
If CES is anything to go by, 2024 is shaping up to be a great year for makers and hobbyists. I loved taking a closer look at Rownd, but it was not even close to the only light-manufacturing company...
More than 100 companies are getting ready to go public on Nasdaq after filing confidentially with the SEC, Barron’s quoted Nasdaq’s CEO Adena Friedman as saying.
A slew of consumer tech and companies focused on consumer packaged goods have gobbled up venture capital in the past year.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander is still operating on orbit, with the company saying there is “growing optimism” that the spacecraft could survive in space longer than the current estimate. The...
Heads-up, startup dreamers and change makers! TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is where you’ll learn the next steps and make the connections you need to turn your idea into a viable business — or ...
Welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, our news roundtable, our gathering of the nerds!
In this world of exploding innovation in the AI industry, a great name paired with a great product will make your technology rise above.
Memphis-based Dextrous Robotics is calling it a day. The news, noted by the Robot Report, was confirmed by the warehouse robotics firm’s CEO, Evan Drumwright, on LinkedIn. The executive spells out ...
Video calls, while essential, often lack the naturalness of in-person conversations, causing fatigue and reduced engagement. There are a ton of tools out there that help you keep eye contact when t...
Low-code dev platforms have gained momentum in recent years, in large part because they promise to shorten what’s otherwise typically a lengthy app development cycle. According to data from a...
Tim Schaecker, a TikToker with 8.8 million followers and a member of the German boy band Elevator Boys, officially launched today a new social networking app in an effort to encourage other content...
In just three short months, TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 — our one-day founder summit/bootcamp — kicks off on April 25 in Boston. We’re excited to announce the first of the many speakers who will sh...
Having a voice is important — figuratively and literally — and not being able to speak is a major impediment to communication. Whispp is working to change the game for individuals with ...
Historically, vacation rental companies have managed homes for homeowners. While this model has proven popular, it also has its drawbacks. Customer complaints around quality get routed through the ...
It’s not news that crypto mining takes a lot of energy. Bitcoin alone is estimated to consume 127 terawatt-hours a year. If Bitcoin was a country, it would slot in roughly as the 32nd biggest...
Developers add Pier’s APIs with a few lines of codes, and the company then manages the credit lifecycle from end-to-end, including origination, underwriting, compliance and servicing.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Rownd tabletop CNC lathe since it showed up on Kickstarter last year, and I was psyched to get the chance to see it in person at CES in Las Vegas this week. In...
Hyperexponential, a London-based insurance technology (insurtech) startup that serves the property-casualty (P&C) insurance industry with “decision intelligence” for pricing, has ra...
Vineet Jain Contributor Share on X Vineet Jain is the CEO and co-founder of Egnyte, a leading cloud-based collaboration and governance platform. An entrepreneur at heart, prior to Egnyte, Vineet fo...
The company integrates cameras and computer vision with routine police operations to address public safety challenges across Latin America.
Finn, a startup based out of Munich that operates a platform for new car subscriptions — an alternative to buying or leasing for those who want to drive new vehicles — has raised a siza...
This is the lowest percentage of venture capital allocated to such teams since 2016, when they picked up 1.6% of all venture funds.
Like any good buzz phrase, “software-defined vehicle” is as straightforward as it is obtuse. If you’re trying to figure out what automakers and suppliers mean by this term — which was all over CES ...
Every few years, a new startup takes a stab at automatic pill dispensers to help with drug adherence and to prevent people from accidentally dosing more than they should. Makes sense: For many of u...
If the clams could speak, what would they say? Surely we all ask ourselves this question every day. But a French startup is going further, allowing bivalves like clams, mussels and oysters to act a...
It’s been over a decade since the first application for a spot bitcoin ETF was filed. After a number of denials over the years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has approved all 11 appli...
I first ran into Nowatch at CES last year, and its founders have been hard at work to evolve the product over the past year, packing in a bunch of AI-powered insights into its wearable jewelry that...
Venture capital had a lot of ups and downs in 2023, so we charted out the numbers to make it clear just how much things actually improved.
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
Mirantis is an enterprise infrastructure startup that has gone through its share of evolutionary cycles since it launched back in 1999. That has included a number of leadership changes, including a...
A startup called Diem wants to tackle the problem of “search engine gender bias,” where results can produce default male information, making many women feel unsatisfied by the answers t...
It’s not impossible that the tagline may flip to “Quora, brought to you by Poe” from “Poe, brought to you by Quora.”
Cybersecurity is a complex and multifaceted field, and even with thorough threat modeling, there’s always a risk of compromise.
Get the correct elements in place for growth before your IPO, and your startup can make steady progress as a public company.
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. This is our revamped Wednesday episode, and we’re going to be digging into critical startup and venture capital news.
Downpayments, a real estate fintech startup, is emerging from stealth today with the mission of helping investors purchase new properties with interest-free down payments. It’s a lofty claim. The M...
Building a profitable AI business poses unique challenges beyond those faced when launching a typical tech startup.
Much-hyped hardware startup Humane announced it’s laying off 10 employees — 4% of its workforce — before it has shipped a single one of its funky new ambient computing devices. Th...
The platform requires no programming knowledge and provides quality control for all applications that employ language models, like ChatGPT, Claude and Cohere.
After years of exploding growth and massive funding rounds, it’s time for consolidation in the micromobility industry. Tier and Dott, two leading European companies in the space, have announced tha...
Seedstars Africa Ventures has received a $30 million capital commitment from EIB Global, an arm of the European Investment Bank, which becomes the first major institutional investment for its first...
If a noticeable chunk of Carta startup and venture customers do leave, it would hurt the company’s otherwise impressive revenue figures, but that seems unlikely to happen.
Treasure Financial has laid off 14 employees, the fintech startup confirmed to TechCrunch today. The layoffs took place in December. The move affected some 60% to 70% of the company, according to m...
Tack One, a Singapore-based startup, wants to help make sure your kids, elderly parents and pets are safe with AI-powered location technology. Today, the company unveiled its new generation of GPS ...
Sandbox AQ, the AI and quantum firm spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2022, has acquired Good Chemistry, a Vancouver-based quantum and computational chemistry startup, for an undisclose...
Now that we’re in recovery mode, there are new rules to play by when it comes to identifying, pitching and partnering with the right investor.
With the availability of different types of generative AI models increasing, more businesses are including features such as summarization, prompt-based image generation and even music-making in the...
This week Becca and Dom are joined by Markus Witte, the co-founder of the language learning platform Babbel.
The trend we noticed at last year’s CES continues: Startups are really curious about your bodily fluids. Vivoo is no exception. The company already offers a broad range of at-home tests and l...
Serenity, the result of a fruitful partnership with Alarm.com, is an innovative fall-detection system that does away with traditional wearables. It is showing off its product for the first time at ...
OpenAI’s impressive technology stack led to a wave of startups building on top of its models and offerings. This is a popular topic on TechCrunch+, where columnists spend considerable time discussi...
We previewed Skyted’s voice-capturing mask last week, but when I came across the startup at CES 2024, I had to check it out for myself in person. You can read all about the tech in our previo...
Is Carta a bad business without a secondary-market trading arm? Can it scale on its other revenue sources to the size it needs to take its large private-market valuation live?
As deepfakes proliferate, their ability to mislead and sow distrust is becoming of major concern to security experts — and the general public. A recent survey from McAfee found that the vast ...
A couple of years ago, Alex Yu and Amit Jain came together to found a company that’d let people capture objects in 3D using their smartphones — no additional equipment required. At the ...
Employee performance reviews take time and effort — and aren’t always conducted very efficiently. According to surveys, nearly 60% of businesses use basic spreadsheets to track and moni...
Early-stage founders face many challenges. Some of the trickiest and most foreign are legal because the legal world is unfamiliar and ever changing.
Schools in the United States are already struggling with a teacher shortage. For students with thinking and learning differences, it’s even harder to find teachers and other specialists that are eq...
AppDirect, a San Francisco- and Montreal-based platform for buying, selling and managing tech through a network of IT advisors, has raised $100 million from CDPQ to expand its financing program for...
Just a few weeks after its most recent round of layoffs, Unity is once again reducing its workforce. This time, around 1,800 employees will lose their job in the coming weeks as the company is tryi...
When is the right time to hire a CFO, and is a full-time CFO even necessary in this age of C-level-as-a-service?
Burro has been on our radar since early 2020, when the company (then Augean) participated in a TechCrunch Robotics pitch-off. The Philly-based firm has actually been around since 2017, but it’s re...
The Brazil-based startup is creating tools for developers of growing e-commerce brands to create high-performance digital experiences.
Governance, risk management and compliance — GRC for short — remains one of the most active startup areas in terms of VC investments. According to Tracxn, the private market data tracke...
You can spend all day long curating custom playlists for every mood, picking tracks based on tempo or intensity, but whether you’re corner-carving or just commuting, you’ll never perfec...
When we consider Lawson’s tenure, the bulk of the company’s life so far is far more telling of the real story than the past few quarters.
At CES 2024, French startup Neoplants is showing off its progress with its houseplants that work as air purifiers designed for the home. The bio-engineered plants can, according to the company, rep...
Pitch, the company behind a collaborative presentation software for businesses, is scaling back and bootstrapping, with CEO and co-founder Christian Reber stepping down and two-thirds of its employ...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week!
Venture capital often finds nonconsensus and nonobvious deals, but the process may take hundreds of meetings before the first yes.
In 10 minutes, companies can onboard into Arc Capital Markets and receive indicative debt terms for up to $250 million within five days from a network of lenders.
Health in Her HUE seeks to connect women of color with healthcare providers and content that can better address their needs.
Nigerian fintech Cleva, focused on creating a banking platform for African individuals and businesses to receive international payments by opening USD accounts, has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed ...
SentinelOne’s deal to acquire PingSafe values the Peak XV-backed young startup at over $100 million, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, in one of the strongest and fastest ...
The hardline stance Oklahoma itself has taken against DEI is at odds with the efforts of its Tulsa tech hub.
We started the year with news of a couple of new venture funds that will be writing checks into fintech startups.
A recent secondary stock sale shows that investors are starting to value Stripe above its most recent, slashed, valuation.
While micromobility companies around the globe have been in limbo and hitting snags like bankruptcy, shutdown and layoffs, a Seoul-based shared e-scooters and e-bikes operator called Gbike is geari...
Thanks to bans on pay toilets dating back to the 1970s, folks in the U.S. have become accustomed to enjoying free public restroom access pretty much anywhere their travels take them. Depending on t...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hello, and welcome to the very last Startups Weekly ever. Don’t worry! We’re not going far — the newsletter continues,...
After a mediocre 2023, investors are optimistic about exit and M&A activity picking back up in 2024. Some think we will see the IPO market bounce back.
Investors are hoping for more enterprise adoption and vertical AI solutions this year as the AI startup market starts to grow up.
The situation has been worsening, and if this continued weakness persists in 2024, we could start to see global VC investment retreat to prior norms.
Paris-based startup Nabla just announced that it has raised a $24 million Series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation, with participation from ZEBOX Ventures — the corporate VC fund of CMA CGM....
This is our Friday show, and today, Mary Ann Azevedo and Alex Wilhelm took on the week’s biggest tech, startup and venture capital news.
This week, we are taking a closer look at Pepper Bio’s seed pitch deck that landed the company $6.5 million.
LLMs are exciting, but developing and adopting them requires overcoming several feasibility hurdles.
Indian financial services startup MobiKwik seeks to raise about $84.2 million through issue of new shares in an initial public offering in the home market, it said in a draft prospectus filed with ...
The whole point of a startup is to build something enduring.
CES has always been the place for weird, out-there gadgets to make their debuts, and this year’s show is no exception. Skyted, a Toulouse, France-based startup founded by former Airbus VP Sté...
Exponent Founders Capital, an early-stage venture firm founded by alumni of startups such as Plaid, Robinhood and Ramp, has closed on $75 million in capital commitments, TechCrunch is the first to ...
Some investors are more optimistic about M&A in 2024, while others think we will see a rebound in the IPO market.
Hopes that it would become easier for startups to raise capital in 2023 were left unmet as the year ended. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or...
Hello, and welcome to 2024! If, like us, you’re still burning off a holiday sugar rush, here’s the perfect way to focus your energy and boost your reputation as a thought-leader at the same time. A...
As search engine incumbents — namely Google — amp up their platforms with GenAI tech, startups are looking to reinvent AI-powered search from the ground up. It might seem like a Sisyphe...
Intel, intent on making bigger moves in the market for AI-powered enterprise software, is spinning out a new platform company with the backing of Boca Raton, Florida–based asset manager and investo...
In this column, I detail where things currently stand with the PERM process and discuss the changes you should look out for that may impact PERM.
As a startup grows, it’s important to instill a strong and inclusive developer culture that can evolve as you add engineers.
Aqua Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that helps companies protect their cloud services, has raised $60 million in funding, extending its previously announced $135 million Series E round ...
Duly took part in TechCrunch Disrupt’s 2023 Battlefield cohort, showing a global audience its contraceptive care platform that is initially targeted at the Indian market.
Diadem Capital, now with pre-seed capital of its own, is building a matching program pairing startups with investors and lenders.
Another proptech startup has run into trouble. Frontdesk, a startup that managed more than 1,000 furnished apartments across the United States, laid off its entire 200-person workforce Tuesday afte...
Ruth Foxe Blader has left her role as partner at Anthemis Group after nearly seven years to start her own venture firm, Foxe Capital, TechCrunch learned exclusively today. Blader is joined by forme...
VCs like to tout they bring value beyond their capital, but many startups say they’ve found the same benefits from crowdfunding investors.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Thank you for subscribing to Startups Weekly. This week, I’m taking my parents to Yosemite to explore the snowy peaks ...
Not much happened when it comes to legal cannabis markets in 2023, which won’t help cannabis startups that are already facing a challenging funding environment.
There was a lot to talk about this year, and investors and founders sure did share their thoughts freely with us in our surveys.
Defense tech startup Shield AI has expanded its latest funding round with another $300 million in equity and debt, bringing its total Series F to $500 million, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. T...
AI is all the rage — particularly text-generating AI, also known as large language models (think models along the lines of ChatGPT). In one recent survey of ~1,000 enterprise organizations, 6...
A look back at some of the promises made by companies and investors following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Beyond just giving women money, F5 Collective wants to create generational change for a billion women across India, Southeast Asia and Australia.
FirstCry, India’s biggest e-commerce platform for mother and baby products, is aiming to raise $218 million through the sale of new shares in its initial public offering, almost a third of the $700...
In this Ask Sophie article, I describe how the IEP program works and will dive into how to qualify for IEP and offer alternatives.
NFTs get a lot of heat, but there’s a widespread belief in the industry that there’s ample value underlying the concept and the various use cases it brings.
For this episode of Equity, we spoke to two Aussie VCs: Dan Krasnostein of Square Peg and Gabrielle Munzer of Main Sequence.
Homes aren’t getting cheaper — or necessarily easier to secure. This year, the median household income for home buyers jumped to $107,000 from $88,000 last year, according to the Nation...
Today on Equity, we’re joined by Deepka Rana, a London-based Principal at Northzone focused on early-stage companies across consumer internet and B2B SaaS.
The next wave of successful startups will help companies harness GenAI to improve organizational productivity while preventing attacks.
Code.org, the U.S. educational nonprofit, has filed a lawsuit in a California district court alleging that Byju’s subsidiary WhiteHat Jr breached a licensing contract by failing to pay fees while c...
Spotta’s devices can identify bugs before they become infestations, both indoors and outdoors.
When faced with seemingly insurmountable odds or a potential windfall investment, what is most important is that you stay true to your company’s mission.
It was pure coincidence, but months before the pandemic took hold around the world, IndieBio — a startup accelerator devoted to startups using biology to solve large problems — expanded...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I know I usually lead Startups Weekly with my own column (and I did write one this week, so if you are somehow a fan o...
Investors aren’t scouring pitch decks as earnestly as they were in the past. There’s still a market for early-stage deals, though.
Arduino is considering manufacturing in India. The startup, best known for its open source microcontroller boards, hopes to restrict the rise of counterfeit boards and cater to the growing demand f...
As 2023 comes to a close, we’re here to look back at the biggest fintech stories of the year. Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion felt like a fintech story in that a number of startups (Brex, Arc and M...
Positioning itself as the “Etsy of food,” HomeCooks has raised $3.2 million in seed funding. What did it do right in its crowdfunding campaign slides?
India’s Ola Electric seeks to raise $661.8 million by selling new shares in an initial public offering, the six-year-old Bengaluru-headquartered startup said in draft papers filed with the co...
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups. This is the second of a two-part series looking back at 2023, as we chat through some of the year’s biggest events.
When Helsing raised a $223 million Series B round, the tech world saw it as continued confirmation that defense was unquestionably back on the investing agenda. Further confirmation comes today, in...
The backlash is only set to heat up come the 2024 election.
Amid rising geopolitical tensions, many Chinese tech companies find themselves recalibrating their overseas pursuits, often sidestepping any reference to their origin. One bold startup called DP Te...
Will 2024 be the year you do whatever it takes to move your startup ambitions to the next level? Heck, yeah! In that entrepreneurial spirit, we’re offering you a holiday gift wrapped inside a New Y...
If successful, the new round could be a step up from the $18.8M Series A EVCS raised in July 2022. But it could also represent a tempering of expectations.
A few years ago, Karine Mellata and Michael Lin met while working at Apple’s fraud engineering and algorithmic risk team. Both engineers, Mellata and Lin were involved with helping to address onlin...
Medallion is a platform for artists to have a dedicated digital hub for promoting album releases, tour dates and merch drops, as well as selling digital collectibles and sharing exclusive content t...
Vestwell, which provides the infrastructure for employers to power workplace savings programs, has raised $125 million in what the company describes as a “preempted” round of funding. Lightspeed Ve...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
A recent spike of interest in crypto is rebuilding momentum, and many think that next year could be promising for crypto startups’ valuations.
Over the last few years, I’ve asked countless people in the robotics space “what comes next after warehouse/fulfillment?” The already popular category got red hot during the pandemic, as online sho...
Construction may well prove to be the next major focus for robotics investment. Here in the States, the $2 trillion industry employs around eight million people — that’s nearly one New York C...
Founding a company during economic uncertainty and excelling takes more than just a hungry founder with a good idea.
Claim, a platform that is both a rewards app and a social network, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The startup is on a mission to make shopping fun, rewarding ...
It’s been more than a year since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, yet we’re still seeing the reverberations of that deal on other social platforms, including the new ones that have cropped ...
The global re-commerce market is poised for growth as consumers increasingly settle for pre-owned goods to save on cost, and as some observe conscious consumption. With the global re-commerce marke...
Bird has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, capping off a turbulent year for the electric scooter company. In a press release today, Bird confirmed that it had entered into a “financial restruc...
ShareChat is in final stages of deliberations to secure about $50 million in new funding that trims the startup’s valuation to as low as below $1.5 billion, according to two sources familiar ...
Micromobility.com, formerly Helbiz, was delisted from the Nasdaq on Monday as a result of the company’s noncompliance with the stock exchange’s listing rules, according to a regulatory ...
While valuations have fallen quite a bit, some sectors are still too inflated for secondaries investors to find attractive.
Even though the economy is signaling a bit of a bounce-back, 2024 might not be much better than 2023 when it comes to startups sharing a piece of the budget pie.
Okta, the identity and access management company, is acquiring security firm Spera. Anticipated to close during the fiscal first quarter beginning in early February, the Spera acquisition will buil...
A European Union plan to support homegrown AI startups by providing them with access to processing power for model training on the bloc’s supercomputers, which was announced back in September...
We last wrote about Breakr — a platform that connects record labels, artists and brands with social media influencers to run mass campaigns in a programmatic way — when it closed a $4.2...
Becca and Dom are joined by Charlie Hernandez, the founder and CEO of My Pocket Lawyer, an online platform that is meant to democratize access to legal advice and guidance.
One of the advantages of using Kubernetes to handle container orchestration is that the containers are ephemeral, living only as long as needed and then going away. That was supposed to help solve ...
From the ElectraMeccanica Solo to the Honda e, let’s remember all the small and low(er)-priced electric vehicles that didn’t make it in 2023.
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups. This is the first of a two-part series that we built for you going back over critical themes from 2023.
The Japanese conglomerate is selling the Open Opportunity Fund to its chairman Paul Judge, and Marcelo Claure, who’s being appointed as vice chairman and general partner.
Poor grocery demand forecasting is responsible for more waste than you might expect. According to one source, grocery stores in the U.S. toss 10% of the roughly 44 billion pounds of food that the c...
2023 proved to be a challenging year on the ransomware front after a brief lull in 2022. According to data from cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis, victims had paid ransomware groups well over...
SimSpace, a startup that creates digital replicas of organizations’ tech and networking stacks for cybersecurity training, has raised $45 million in a funding round led by L2 Point Management...
Black people make up 2.5% of the U.K.’s population; proper representation in venture would mean at least 2.5% of funds going to Black-led businesses.
Snowflake is buying Samooha, a startup developing a “cross-cloud” data collaboration suite, the companies announced this morning — adding to the list of big tech acquisitions lead...
Most startup exits look nothing like the Adobe-Figma deal, which means this breakup won’t impact most future startup acquisitions.
TechCrunch Early Stage returns to Boston on April 25, 2024, and the agenda for our flagship founder event is shaping up. We’re excited to share this sneak peek at some of the fantastic speakers and...
Meltwater, which first made its name around media monitoring and then got active in business intelligence using AI and big data analytics techniques, is picking up a new investor. Verdane, a Norweg...
Autonomous vehicle company May Mobility has launched its first driverless on-demand microtransit service on public roads in Sun City, Arizona in partnership with transit tech company Via. The miles...
What does it all mean for startups entering 2024? It means they have to prove their worth more than ever.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Sometimes it’s important to state the obvious. That democracies are fragile but that technology can help. And also that crowdfunding isn’t always the best way to launch an innovative pr...
Montamo hires and trains people to work in the clean energy transition with an emphasis on helping migrants build a new career.
Women’s health, as it has existed for the past 200 years, is dead. One hammer for all of our problems will no longer suffice.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. You shouldn’t compare apples to oranges, but similarly, comparing iPhones to Androids is a fool’s errand as well...
“Entrepreneurs navigating the later stages of a startup face a mine field of funding options, and not all of them are suitable for their business,” writes David Spreng, founder and CEO of Runway G...
A critical cohort of tech firms has regained the value it lost after the summer rally, setting the stage for a stronger IPO cycle in early 2024.
Let’s take a deep dive into the pitch deck that climate tech startup Metafuels used to raise its $8 million seed round.
Opendoor co-founder Eric Wu is stepping down from the real estate tech company, according to an SEC filing. In a statement, Wu said: “After ten years, I am called to get back to my startup roots an...
Baris Guzel Contributor Share on X Baris Guzel is an engineer with work experience in top-tier investment banking and venture capital. He is a partner at BMW i Ventures, where he has led investment...
About 70% of founders are optimistic about the opportunities for crypto startups in 2024, per a new survey shared exclusively with TechCrunch+.
What do iconic Valley investors Zachary Bogue and Chris Sacca have in common? They are both trying to stop cows from burping methane. What gives? With the conclusion of COP28, the global talks on t...
The traditional role of the real estate agent has long been challenged as the internet has made it easier for people to search for, and tour, homes. Historically, agents have received 6% commission...
There are multiple ways to finance the growth stage of your business, but it’s essential to always have an eye on your long-term goals.
In 2023, Kapital’s customer base grew to 80,000 small businesses in Mexico, Colombia and Peru. It also acquired Banco Autofin Mexico S.A. in September.
Australia-based link-in-bio platform Linktree announced today that it has acquired competitor Koji from its parent company GoMeta for an undisclosed amount. Linktree said that Koji’s link-in-...
Companies are increasingly curious about AI and the ways in which it can be used to (potentially) boost productivity. But they’re also wary of the risks. In a recent Workday survey, enterpris...
Each fund is $212.5 million and will invest in pre-seed, seed and Series A companies across consumer enterprise, healthcare, financial, biotech and climate.
The new fund invests across the computing, automation, infrastructure, logistics, decarbonization and engineered biology industries.
The investment arm of the U.K. retail bank M&G has led a funding of $340 million into Udaan, a business-to-business e-commerce startup, in one of the largest financing rounds secured by an Indi...
Berlin-based climate startup ecoworks is using digital technologies, AI and industrial robots to tackle a huge and critical problem: Energy inefficient buildings. Around three-quarters of buildings...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
Palace intrigue might be dominating the news cycle around OpenAI, but the AI startup — and its co-branded accelerator programs — are chugging along uninterrupted, so the PR team tells m...
We fed a few thousand pitch decks to an AI, analyzed them all, and found the most common problems are for founders raising early-stage funding.
Gift giving. It’s top of mind this time of year, and we’re here to suggest two ways you can spread joy this holiday season. First, never — and we mean never — give the “gift” of fruit cake. Second,...
We brought on Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic and co-founder of WordPress, along with Kishan Bagaria, the founder of Texts.com, to talk about the transaction and what it means.
Verve Motion, a startup building a robotic “exosuit” designed to help workers complete physically demanding tasks in factories and other like environments, today announced that it raise...
Zuper’s platform provides automated workflows and workforce collaboration so that customers have the best possible experience.
Metafuels sets out to change the landscape of sustainable jet fuel, and has just picked up an $8 million suitcase from baggage carousel 3 at its local ZRH. Ahh, Zurich. The company is making the sk...
French startup Pivot is an interesting startup story as it is scaling at a rapid pace even though startup investments are down in Europe. After raising a $5.3 million pre-seed round in April (€5 mi...
Just a couple of weeks after announcing $22 million in fundraising, Paris-based startup studio Hexa is expanding beyond its studio model to partner with later-stage companies that have already foun...
Aye Finance, an Indian startup that offers its digital lending platform to small firms, has raised $37.18 million in a fresh funding round led by British International Investment, as it looks to co...
True Anomaly has closed $100 million in new funding, a strong signal that the appetite for startups operating at the intersection of space and defense is far from abating. The new round was led by ...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software isn’t just for managing customer relationships anymore. Here’s a detailed guide to setting up your own system for pitching investors.
Welcome back to Found. This week we are joined by James Wagoner, the co-founder and CEO of Joule Case, a startup that is creating a cleaner alternative to diesel generators.
Now is a great time to brush up your pitch decks, practice your pitch, and get ready for when things kick off again next year.
Pixelynx, an Animoca Brands-owned metaverse company co-founded by DJ and producer Deadmau5, announced today its newest suite of tools for its flagship product Korus, an AI-powered music creation pl...
The new priced round comes as the company gears up for drilling test boreholes next year using its gyrotron-powered rig.
The increasing need to reduce carbon emissions drives many industries, including airlines and transportation, to seek sustainable alternatives to meet emission reduction targets and fulfill corpora...
The application of generative AI in the workplace is a long game, and we’re in the very early stages.
The factories that process our food and beverages (newsflash: no, it doesn’t come straight from a farm) have to be kept very clean, or we’d all get very ill, to be blunt. Ensuring that usually enta...
Developers are embracing AI — some surveys suggests, at least. The Q&A site Stack Overflow polled devs on their attitudes toward code-generating AI tools and found that the vast majority ...
Builders, bakers and body conditioners might not be the first trades that come to mind when you think about how AI is transforming how we work. But today a startup that’s building AI-powered ...
The temperature is plummeting, the stockings are hung by the fireplace with care, the sixth candle is soon to be lit and Santa Con is now, mercifully, little more than distant vomit stains. It’s th...
Comun offers digital banking services, including instant payments, check deposits and early paychecks and provides customers with access to native Spanish-speaking reps seven days a week.
Jitjatjo, a gig marketplace through which businesses can book workers with as little as an hour’s notice, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Morningside T...
Tribe Capital is in talks to lead a $75 million to $100 million funding round into the logistics aggregator Shiprocket, according to a person familiar with the matter. This is a notable financing d...
Many companies already use generative AI tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can help improve workers’ performance by as much as 40% compared with workers who don’t use it. Howeve...
In today’s digital and global economy, a brand name can mean the difference between being remembered and being completely forgotten.
AtomicJar was seemingly a high-flying early-stage startup with a hefty (by today’s standards) $25 million Series A last January. It was building a commercial container testing platform, based on a ...
Welcome back to Equity. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week.
Food tech investors discuss another consecutive quarter of decline in venture capital investments into areas like plant-based meat alternatives and cultivated meat.
Every day we seem to hear another news story about some government entity exploring how to regulate AI. Just last week, the EU finalized a new set of rules, but they are far from alone, as other co...
French startup Mistral AI has officially closed its much anticipated Series A funding round. The company has raised €385 million, or $415 million at today’s exchange rate — according to Bloomberg, ...
Nth Cycle is one of the few startups tackling the cleantech’s carbon-heavy supply chain and building a cleaner infrastructure for the sector.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
People moving on to new jobs is not a bad thing — and not only when they have been laid off. That’s why it’s uplifting to see employers encourage this process.
Was it too good to be true? Beeper, the startup that reverse-engineered iMessage to bring blue bubble texts to Android users, is experiencing an outage, the company reported via a post on X on Frid...
Borrowing has become more expensive, and profits are harder to come by, which means that 2023 has been a savage year in startup land.
Founded by a former flight attendant, Atlanta-based startup Travelsist and its Travelsistants provides assistance to travelers on behalf of airports and airlines.
Personal data is the new gold. The recent 23andMe data breach is a stark reminder of a chilling reality — our most intimate, personal information might not be as secure as we think. It’...
It appears that investors have even less patience for long, rambling pitch decks. The name of the game now is “Short and Sweet.”
Secondary venture activity has ebbed and flowed over the last few months, following a particularly busy summer. But 2024 may see investors returning for good, writes Rebecca Szkutak. Full TechCrunc...
OpenAI is working with former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior advisor to facilitate talks with the government about AI policy, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. OpenAI is also looking...
It is imperative to show that investors’ money will go into a product that genuinely has the power to change the world.
The rise in interest rates has primarily influenced the shift to a more challenging environment for startups over the past 18 months.
Welcome back to Equity. This is our Friday show, and today, Mary Ann Azevedo, Kirsten Korosec and Alex Wilhelm got together to go over the week’s biggest tech and startup news.
How well do you remember everything that happened this year? Quiz yourself and find out!
Email is quite profitable, as it turns out. Or rather, email communications software is. Today, Toronto-based ContactMonkey, a platform that lets companies create, send and track internal comms fro...
Secondary activity is expected to return to normal in 2024. Five investors tells us where they are interested and where they are not.
A number of fintech startups similar to Coinbase and Robinhood could benefit from the renewed optimism around the two companies.
Kenyan insurtech Lami Technologies in February last year announced its acquisition of Bluewave, another startup within the insurance space, to expand its product offerings and enable it to scale in...
Retro is a super interesting social app that helps you share photos and catch up with long-distance friends, family members and everyone who matters in your life. And today, the company is shipping...
Suzanne Fletcher invested in 10 companies from the new fund, so far, and plans to invest in 40 companies in total.
Mammoth, an app from the Mozilla-backed startup focused on building a more consumer-friendly entry point to the world of decentralized social media, is out today with its next big upgrade: Mammoth ...
Long before most of us were thinking about large language models, DataCebo co-founders Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Neha Patki were creating an open source library called Synthetic Data Vault, or SDV ...
With the news that Microsoft’s Copilot is getting OpenAI’s latest models and a new code interpreter, it’s clear the battle over the future of AI is increasingly being fought at the developer and en...
Josh Claman Contributor Share on X Josh Claman is the CEO of Accelsius, makers of direct-to-chip, two-phase cooling technology. An advocate for the power of transformative technology throughout his...
A new company, Rhythms, wants to help organizations improve their productivity by using AI to identify the working patterns of top-performing teams. Rhythms, which integrates with a business’...
The United States has long had an affordable housing crisis, but it’s been exacerbated as of late by a surge in mortgage interest rates and low inventory. The problem is especially acute for lower-...
Sona is a new web3 streaming protocol that uses DeFi primitives (decentralized finance basic building blocks) to put the financial power back into artists’ hands with its rewards model, auctions an...
A recent report from Pitchbook shows that ‘mega-deals’ could be inflating AI startup funding totals, giving a misleading picture of the sector’s health.
Navan, an expense management startup once known as TripActions, has laid off 5% of its staff, or 145 people, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch today. The Information first broke the news. R...
Amazon has been No. 1 in the cloud for years but now finds itself playing catch-up to Microsoft when it comes to AI.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by David Rogier, the founder and CEO of MasterClass.
Multi-platform messaging startup Beeper, founded by YC and Pebble alum Eric Migicovsky, delivered an iMessage experience for Android that doesn’t use any intermediaries and, as such, should b...
ZestMoney, a buy now, pay later startup whose ability to underwrite small ticket loans to first-time internet customers attracted many high-profile investors, including Goldman Sachs, is shutting d...
We’re seeing a lot of folks push their capital into just a few squares on the betting table. One way or another, the result is going to be notable.
The push to bring iMessage to Android users today adds a new contender. A startup called Beeper, which had been working on a multi-platform messaging aggregator, is now launching a new app called B...
When Respell founder Matthew Rastovac was in high school, he did an internship where his job was to copy information from a government website into a spreadsheet. It was mind-numbing work, so being...
AllSpice shifted its strategy to bring enterprise engineers together to more easily collaborate on projects.
Rightbot, a startup developing suction-based robots that can unload truck-transported freight in a range of sizes, has raised $6.25 million in a funding round led by Amazon’s Industrial Innov...
Kyron Learning, an AI-based learning startup, announced today its $14.6 million Series A funding round plus an $850,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The new capital will furt...
Today’s most capable text-generating AI models are also those most likely to make mistakes. It’s well-established at this point that text-generating models hallucinate, or make up facts...
Around a year ago, TechCrunch wrote about a little-known company developing AI-accelerating chips to face off against hardware from titans of industry — e.g. Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Meta, AWS...
Supply chain and e-commerce enablement startup Omniful has today emerged from stealth with $5.85 million seed funding led by VentureSouq, with participation from 500 Global, DASH Ventures, Jahez Gr...
Carbon Maps is a relatively new entrant in the carbon and environmental accounting space as it is less than one year old. But the French company has already secured $7.6 million in funding (€7 mill...
Automakers and technology companies are building ever-more sophisticated digital platforms into the future generations of cars and other vehicles. Today, a startup that’s built a system to ma...
Egyptian online auto parts marketplace Mtor has raised $2.8 million in pre-seed investment led by Egypt-focused venture capital firm Algebra Ventures. Other investors that participated in the round...
The new capital will go toward building a pilot brewery in Amsterdam so that Farmless can develop its first products to replace meat, dairy and eggs.
Online collaboration has become routine thanks to productivity apps like Google Docs and team design platform Figma, among others, but there are still hosts of internet-connected applications where...
Lux, the startup and makers of the popular pro photography app Halide and others, is venturing into video. The team today announced its plans to debut a new app, Kino, arriving in roughly two month...
Companies are betting big on generative AI to gain a competitive edge. But adoption challenges remain. According to a recent survey from EY, a significant portion of businesses looking to embrace g...
For LatAm startups, investments from foreign VCs can bring in experienced advisers and contributors who can help the company expand to new markets.
Up Catalyst can tweak the basic process to also manufacture carbon nanotubes for paint or reinforced concrete, as well as graphite tailored to hydrogen fuel cells.
ArmorCode, a cybersecurity platform that gathers vulnerability data from connected apps and software infrastructure, consolidating the data into a single location and standardizing it for analysis,...
Allen Career Institute has acquired Doubtnut in a deal that values the young edtech at $10 million, according to a person familiar with the matter, a stunning reversal of fortune for the once fast-...
MoveInSync, an Indian startup offering mobility solutions to blue-chip companies for workplace commute, is engaging with investors to raise a growth round, according to people familiar with the del...
Indonesia’s construction industry is growing quickly, driven by residential and industrial building, alongside infrastructure development plans by the government. Sourcing skilled labor is still a ...
The fund is technically a nonprofit with a debt fund attached.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Today we’re focusing on metrics and business environments that apply to most SaaS companies — not the unicorn outliers.
RepeatMD recently raised a $50 million Series A round to serve the exploding med spa industry that is built on consumer beauty trends.
Fisker, the California-based EV startup, cut its annual production guidance in an effort to free up $300 million in working capital, the company said in a business update Friday. Fisker said it exp...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Hello, you scrumptious specimen of a human being. Have you looked yourself in the mirror and given yourself a high fiv...
Gathering data to monitor forests that are conserved or restored is tedious, leaving the door wide open for startups in the space.
We’re going to put the deck Scalestack used to raise its $1M seed round under the microscope to see what it got right, and where it could have done better.
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups. This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
Arbor is betting that an approach to carbon removal known as BiCRS will not only help balance the climate, but also benefit rural communities.
We’re still in the early stages of AI, and TechCrunch+ can help you learn and adapt with every change and new best practice in the coming year.
Leading defense tech startup Anduril has developed a new product designed to take on the proliferation of low-cost, high-powered aerial threats. The product is called Roadrunner, a modular, twin-je...
Defense startup Epirus is getting new leadership. TechCrunch has exclusively learned staff were informed at an all-hands meeting this morning that CEO Ken Bedingfield was leaving. The news was late...
Alternative investment platform Yieldstreet announced today that it has agreed to acquire Cadre, an online real-estate-focused investment platform aimed at institutional and high net worth investor...
Stensul added dozens of new features and functionalities. Most notable is Landing Page, which gives customers a no-code, drag-and-drop way to build integrated landing pages.
The biotech startup’s $6.5 million seed round is led by VC firm NFX but it is perhaps equally noteworthy to see that Merck is also participating in the round.
Clayful is a platform that enables students aged eight to 18 to connect with a mental health expert within 60 seconds when they need it. The startup said it had raised $7 million in funding from in...
Again Bio says its modified bacteria currently eats about a ton of CO2 per day. Spun out by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark, Again Bio sics its hungry microbes on flue gas from a...
For the past decade, three companies have been building full-fledged e-book ecosystems with devices, apps and digital bookstores all working perfectly together — Amazon, Rakuten and a tiny company ...
Incarcerated people in correctional facilities around the country have wildly varying levels of opportunity to prepare for life after release. Nucleos is a startup that hopes to make the kind of e-...
In conditions today, completing even a Series A round is a powerful symbol of your fintech project’s promise.
Amini, a Kenya-based climate-tech startup bridging the environmental data gap in Africa, has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Salesforce Ventures and the Female Founders Fund. Clima...
When consumers switched to home deliveries and “digitized” their lifestyles during the pandemic, it led to a surge in e-commerce sales and thus, also, in the need for warehousing and shipping. But ...
Businesses will never not (forgive the double negative) push to improve efficiency. It’s their commercial imperative. Sometimes, that takes the form of budget cuts. Other times, it’s mo...
The new investment will be deployed into growing Zubale’s three e-commerce productivity offerings, continued product development and strategies to consolidate its presence in Mexico and Brazi...
In Western markets, freight forwarders are well into digitizing their operations, but the same doesn’t hold true in Southeast Asia, say the founders of Fr8Labs. The reasons for that include the lac...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
We’re searching for seasoned startup founders and subject-matter experts to host a roundtable at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. Our one-day summit, designed for emerging early-stage startup founders,...
Generative AI companies continue to raise huge amounts of capital to fuel their commercial — and, in some cases, open source — ambitions. See Together, a startup creating open source ge...
Has late-stage investing declined so much that no technology subsector can really post impressive investment numbers?
Byju’s said on Wednesday that recent accusations by India’s crime-fighting agency regarding a breach of the nation’s foreign exchange rule are “solely technical” in na...
It’s only appropriate that, during AWS’ biggest week of the year, a cloud-based software-as-a-service startup closed a sizeable funding round. DuploCloud, which sells a set of tools to ...
Tola Capital III will invest 25 to 30 companies globally and write average check sizes of between $1 million to $4 million for seed-stage companies.
Investment giant Prosus has written down the valuation of edtech giant Byju’s to below $3 billion, marking a steep drop from the $22 billion valuation the Indian startup hit early last year. ...
Australia and New Zealand are facing the same challenges as the rest of tech: valuations have come back down, early-stage funding is up, and investors want their businesses to focus on sustainable ...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Neil Batlivala, the CEO and co-founder at Pair Team, a startup building infrastructure to ...
Popular stock trading app Webull has acquired Mexican investment platform Flink, giving it an entry into the Mexico market. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Although Webull has China...
If Shein and Reddit can do better than our miniscule tech IPO class of 2023, they could leave the sort of accelerative impact that tech startups so desperately need right now.
Do you have an idea that might have startup potential? Are you already an emerging founder trying to get your startup off the ground? Then head directly to TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 on April 25 i...
Companies on the hunt for comprehensive project management and issue tracking tooling aren’t exactly short of options, with the likes of Atlassian’s Jira serving software development te...
The generative AI hype hasn’t died down yet. Case in point, Pika, a startup creating an AI-powered platform to edit and generate videos from captions and still images, today announced that it...
Candex, a startup that aims to simplify procurement — specifically vendor management and payment processes — for businesses, today announced that it raised $45 million in a Series B inv...
Many legal tech startups streamline manual workflow for lawyers, and some legal tech companies provide tech solutions centered around intellectual property (IP). Among them is a startup called Solv...
NXTP Fund III represents over a 2x increase from the size of its previous fund, enabling the firm to invest in between 25 and 30 companies this time around.
If you are building a startup you might wish that 2021 were here again. So much capital flowed around the world that many young tech companies were able to raise several times in the span of a sing...
We last wrote about Lassie, a pet health app and insurance provider, when it closed an €11 million Series A round in 2022. Its growth had been spurred by the boom in pet ownership during the pandem...
French startup Augment has seen the incredible rise of online courses and edtech companies, as well as its potential when it comes to reinventing education at scale. That’s why the startup has been...
Hussain Elius is best known as the co-founder of Pathao, one of Bangladesh’s top ridesharing apps. For his latest startup, however, Elius is exploring the world of DeFi with Wind.app, a self-custod...
You might not be familiar with Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that has launched dozens of B2B software companies, but some of its portfolio companies have become well-known unicorns, such as ...
Textiles and garments contribute 16% of Vietnam’s total GPD, but it’s challenging for small garment brands to take advantage of the country’s manufacturing prowess. Inflow is stepping into the gap,...
The downturn in the technology sector — dragged by inflation, higher interest rates and geopolitical events — continues to persist, and one of the most acutely impacted areas has been V...
Biotech and AI startup Cradle is finding success with its generative approach to protein design, landing big customers and a hefty $24 million of new investment. The company exited stealth a little...
Veev, a real estate developer turned tech-enabled homebuilder, is on the verge of shutting down after reaching unicorn status last year, according to multiple reports. Calcalist reported on Sunday ...
Here’s a rundown of the key names reporting third-quarter results this week and what we might learn from them.
This was quite the year for the crypto industry. From funding shortfalls to the SBF saga playing out in public, the industry and its proponents had a wild year.
Co-founders Roberto Arroyo and his brother, Nicolas Arroyo, bootstrapped the company for almost four years and reached profitability while expanding into Chile, Guatemala and Argentina.
Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed Ventures, explains how early-stage startups will be impacted by GenAI, and what to look out for.
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news — and you might be glad to know today was not all about OpenAI.
Traditionally, the aesthetics and wellness industry — med spas, dermatologists, plastic surgeons, weight loss clinics, OBGYNS and so on — have leaned on in-person consultations and ad h...
Creators often work with different collaborators for different projects. And splitting payments with others is one of the biggest challenges for creators. Mozaic (previously Jammber) is trying to s...
Keep the machines in mind; they are more pervasive than you might think. The good news is that making your pitch decks machine-readable is not actually hard to do.
A lot of the buzz these days in artificial intelligence is around generative AI and how AI is being used to accelerate software and products for consumers. Today, an AI startup called PhysicsX R...
Anil Goel, the CTO of Byju’s, is leaving the edtech giant, he informed some colleagues amid a broader restructuring at the Bengaluru-headquartered startup as it looks to pare down costs and u...
EMotorad, an Indian startup manufacturing electric bikes, raised $20 million in a Series B round as it aims to disrupt China’s market domination and expand its presence in global markets. The...
“What controversy?” said the journalist from a global mainstream television outlet to me at the Web Summit Media Dinner, earlier this month in Lisbon. For all the heat and light, the gnashing of te...
David Blumberg, founder and managing partner at Blumberg Ventures, explains how early-stage startups can look to their investors for help with solving problems, scaling, hiring, and strategic plann...
Neuralink, the Elon Musk-founded company developing implantable chips that can read brain waves, has raised an additional $43 million in venture capital, according to a filing with the SEC. The fil...
Raphael Ouzan Contributor Share on X Raphael Ouzan is the founder and CEO of A.Team, a future-of-work company pioneering the world’s first AI-enabled team formation platform. More posts by this con...
Saviu Ventures, a VC firm targeting startups in Francophone Africa, has made an initial close of €12 million for its second fund with the backing of private investors, including French and Kenyan f...
If I map myself against the standards of fundraising today, none of those startups would’ve had a gnat’s shadow’s chance of raising money.
Institutional real estate investors have historically struggled to buy up tons of family homes (the so-called “Single Family rental sector”) so they can turn us all into rental slaves a...
When Maha Shahzad was 19, she was forced to drop out of junior college in Southern California because of a six-hour daily commute. When she moved to Pakistan for work, half of her salary was spent ...
Founded by an expert on geography and globalization, Climate Alpha’s AI-based platform helps real estate owners and investors analyze the impact of climate change on their portfolios. The Singapore...
Luko’s parent company, Demain ES, will be put for sale via a legal notice in the newspaper after Admiral abandoned ship.
The geographic isolation of Australia and New Zealand creates a sense of hustle, if not urgency, around raising funds and building a global product.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from building companies, it’s that you’ve got to be straight and honest with your board.
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
A CFO’s tech stack should include tried-and-true methods and embrace innovative tools that streamline financial tasks and support data-driven decision-making.
Following the advertiser exodus from X, formerly Twitter, over concerns about antisemitic content on the site, X has lost another high-profile brand campaign, as Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media is...
Incumbents in the parcel deliveries space usually have fixed daily routes from suburban depots. But since most parcels are fairly lightweight, this is a bit of a hammer to crack a nut. So it makes ...
The company offers hyper-personalization email and SMS campaigns and retail transaction data insights from one dashboard.
While everybody is trying to figure out how artificial intelligence can be leveraged across various industries, French startup Osium AI has found an interesting use case for AI — research and devel...
This is part of a survey of investors focused on Australia and New Zealand. The following responses are from the New Zealand investors.
This is part of a survey of investors focused on Australia and New Zealand. The following responses are from the Australian investors.
Cameroonian health startup Waspito has secured a $2.5 million seed extension from DP World through Newtown Partners, Saviu Ventures, AAIC Investment, Axian Ventures and CFAO’s Health54 to spur its ...
Audio entertainment startup Pocket FM has topped $160 million in annualized revenue runrate and is inching closer to raising over $80 million in a new funding round, three sources familiar with the...
Integrating with a payment API is something most — if not all — business-to-consumer platforms are forced to do at some point. It’s practically unavoidable if they wish to take cr...
AI startups that aren’t OpenAI are plugging away this week, it’d seem — sticking to their product roadmaps even as coverage of the chaos at OpenAI dominates the airwaves. See: Sta...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
Welcome back to Found, where we get to the stories behind the startups. Becca and Dom are joined by Lisa Bubbers and Anna Harman, co-founders of the ear piercing company Studs.
OpenAI’s board of directors is reportedly in talks with Sam Altman, ex-Y Combinator president and an OpenAI co-founder, to return to OpenAI as CEO as soon as this week. That’s according...
With the OpenAI drama continuing to deliver exciting headlines on the company’s uncertain future, Thanksgiving week is anything but slow.
Three OpenAI board members stepped down earlier this year within months of each other — yet the startup didn’t line up replacements. One of the current members, former Facebook CTO and ...
Social magazine app Flipboard had already committed to joining the “fediverse” — the decentralized social web, which includes apps like Mastodon. Now, it’s doubling down on ...
The crypto community has been enjoying a welcome reprieve from the dismal climate of the past year but it’s unclear if these recent gains will translate into more lasting interest in the dece...
It has been a whirlwind four days for OpenAI, the generative AI poster child behind the smash hit ChatGPT. Seemingly out of nowhere, the OpenAI board ousted CEO and co-founder Sam Altman and demote...
One AI startup’s undoing is another’s opportunity. Case in point: Today, AI21 Labs, a company developing generative AI products along the lines of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and ChatGPT, clos...
Vendelux offers 65 million data points on over 160,000 global events, tradeshows and conferences so event marketers can make better decisions about what to attend or sponsor.
French startup Indy has recently closed a new funding round of $44 million (€40 million), with BlackFin Capital Partners leading the round. Indy started as an automated accounting platform for free...
In interviews on CNBC and Bloomberg TV tonight, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that it’s possible Sam Altman, who was fired from his role as CEO at OpenAI by the AI startup’s...
For a lot of companies, Scope 3 emissions make up the bulk of their carbon footprint, but are time-consuming and expensive for them to track. As more regulation mandating Scope 3 reporting is passe...
It is likely not an overstatement to say that the relationship between U.S. defense and Silicon Valley is undergoing its most profound transformation since the 1950s.
Yet another software license is vying for the attentions of SaaS companies seeking to align themselves with the open source realm, without compromising their commercial endeavors. Sentry, an app pe...
OpenAI’s meltdown is likely to become the latest installment in what’s becoming a Silicon Valley tradition. It’s hard to know how this will end.
Fundraising is down across the board, but emerging managers were able to raise the same percentage of that funding total as in former years.
Will this Congress ever pass an omnibus deal? We don’t recommend holding your breath. Instead, consider the uncontentious Black Friday meets Cyber Monday deal we’re offering on passes to TechCrunch...
Several political perspectives are shaping quite a lot of the work on artificial intelligence, and so we need to understand them, especially now.
As more players seek to establish themselves, the competitive landscape grows that much fiercer. Meanwhile, the available funding is finite.
The OpenAI saga continues. This morning, Ilya Sutskever, the AI startup’s chief scientist and board director, published a mea culpa of sorts on X (formerly Twitter). Sutskever was among those...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. This past weekend was all about the massive shakeup at OpenAI and the high-impact machinations the last few days brought.
The AI hype train is going full swing. At this point, it is hard to name an industry not affected by this disruptive technology.
LucidLink, a startup offering a platform that enables teams to work on files without having to download or sync them, today announced that it raised $75 million in a Series C round led by Brighton ...
SEVA intends to invest in New York-based customer-centric founders of fast-growing, bootstrapped companies to scale via profitable growth.
Riverwood Capital has closed on $1.8 billion in new capital, the growth investment firm announced today. The firm last raised in 2020, with total capital commitments of $1.4 billion at that time. R...
A new startup is targeting the lucrative workplace productivity space with an open source approach to project and knowledge management — and it has received backing from a who’s who of ...
Capping off a tumultuous weekend at OpenAI that culminated in investors — and a contingent of employees — attempting to convince the company’s board to hire back former Y Combinat...
On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT and other viral AI-powered hits, did something unexpected but seemingly well within its right: it removed the company’s CEO, Sam ...
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen made it clear that while he was keen on buying Convoy because of the “incredible tech stack” it built, he wasn’t buying its strategy.
Pippin Title uses AI to help its customers navigate the fragmented world of property titles into one digital space.
Every decision that leaders make should carry a precise expectation of its business impact, fitting into broader company goals.
In a surprising move, OpenAI today abruptly fired Sam Altman, its CEO and a member of its board of directors, and installed CTO Mira Murati as interim CEO. But who, exactly, is Mira Murati? Murati,...
Who knows what GamePlanner does, but Airbnb just bought the company. Let’s dive in to this and other news from startup land.
Good morning! All signs are pointing to a recovery in 2024, and that’ll be better for some than others. The past few years have seen investors propping up mediocre portfolio companies, hoping...
Enterprise startups were hit hard in 2023, but VCs are a little more optimistic about their portfolio companies heading into 2024.
AI is a chaotic free-for-all right now, especially when it comes to the fundraising cycles. Does Fifth Dimension stand out from the crowd?
Cozy game, interior decorating app, learn-to-code primer or something in between, the interactive, 3D spaces builder known as Rooms has made its way to the App Store. The startup, which earlier rai...
This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ehsan Vaghefi, CEO and co-founder of Toku, grew up with a blind father who lost eyesight at the age of four due to congenital glaucoma. As a result of this, his dad was involved with the Blind Foun...
Pricepally, a Nigerian online grocery store for fresh produce and packaged food, has raised $1.3 million seed funding, backed by Samurai Incubate (a Japanese VC that also participated in the startu...
The founders of IRL, Abraham Shafi and Genrikh Khachatryan, are suing their investors, claiming that they intentionally sabotaged the company. At its peak, IRL was poised to become an event organiz...
Menlo Ventures has raised $1.35 billion in new capital that it plans to use in part “to support the forthcoming generation of AI startups,” the venture firm announced today. Notably and unsurprisin...
Syed Balkhi Contributor Share on X Syed Balkhi is founder and CEO of Awesome Motive, a software holding company that provides website tools to help small businesses grow and compete with big compan...
Thoma Bravo is paying a fat premium to take EQS private ahead of what it anticipates to be a lucrative time for the company’s market segment.
Jay Hack, an AI researcher with a background in natural language processing and computer vision, came to the realization several years ago that large language models (LLMs) — think OpenAIR...
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 returns to Boston, Massachusetts, on April 25! Ready to turn your startup dream into a reality? Want to be prepared when you join the startup world after graduation? Int...
Siena AI developed an AI-powered customer support solution that might be a machine, but understands context and responds with empathy like a human.
Customer data-syncing startup Hightouch announced today it has acquired HeadsUp. As part of the deal, HeadsUp co-founder Earl Lee will join Hightouch, working on Customer 360, a product that uses A...
InDrive, the “bid-based” ride-hail platform popular in Latin America and Asia, has launched a new venture and merger and acquisition division named New Ventures to invest up to $100 mil...
The future is going to be electric, but in the air and on the water that transition is proving more difficult than on land. Candela has taken a big step toward electrifying traditionally gas-powere...
Ida is a relatively new French startup that wants to work with supermarkets and grocery stores to optimize new orders of fresh products, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry and fish. The star...
The Australian government recently set new packaging regulations after an official review found just 18% of plastic packaging is recycled, falling far short of a 70% target by 2025. Refilled, a Syd...
In this week’s Ask Sophie column, we’ll dive into your best options for moving to the U.S. to join your co-founder and expand your business.
Anthym, a platform for employees to connect through personal memories and music taste, launched its latest product to make the onboarding process feel more personable for new hires. Dubbed “Welcome...
Inito, a YC alum that helps women track fertility hormones quickly at home, has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Fireside Ventures. The startup’s fertility monitor and kit is designed t...
Can tech companies meet rising investor confidence in their value with future results that will defend or extend those gains?
Every year, hundreds of (very) early-stage startups choose to participate in one of the startup programs of Station F, an iconic startup campus based in Paris. And Station F has shared a list of th...
There is a wealth of information on the internet about fundraising for startups, but the existing playbooks need to be updated for women.
Patrick Murphy Contributor Share on X Patrick Murphy is a founding partner at Tapestry VC, an early-stage venture capital firm operating between San Francisco and London that focuses on backing tec...
Welcome back to Equity. TechCrunch’s Rebecca Bellan joined the podcast to help us better understand Google’s search-related antitrust case that is currently ongoing in the United States...
“Sober curious” and “mindful drinking” have become popular terms in recent years, with 47% of the U.S. adult population wanting to cut back on alcohol. Sunnyside, the app pr...
Tamar Huggins created the platform with her 13-year-old daughter, and hopes to target the Black Gen Z community.
Vulcan Cyber, a company developing software to help enterprises detect vulnerabilities in their software stack, today announced that it raised $55 million in equity financing led by Maor Investment...
Tanda offers a peer-to-peer savings and lending network to small businesses as a way to retain employees, reduce turnover and minimize burnout.
Remote, the HR tech company that allows companies to hire, manage and pay remote workers, is launching a remote job marketplace called Remote Talent. CEO and co-founder Job van der Voort said it se...
Keegan Caldwell Contributor Share on X Keegan Caldwell is the global managing partner and founder at Caldwell, a premier law firm specializing in high-growth technology and life sciences companies....
Fast-delivery startup Getir announced last week that it was buying FreshDirect, an online grocery delivery company.
Airbnb has acquired a secretive new AI startup, GamePlanner.AI, the company announced this morning. CNBC reports that the purchase price was around $200 million, a figure that TechCrunch was unable...
AI image generator Stable Diffusion already has a lot of fans, and now those experimenting with the new AI technology to develop their own models have a place to share their work with other enthusi...
Rebecca Liu-Doyle Contributor Share on X Rebecca Liu-Doyle is managing director at Insight Partners, a global private equity and venture capital firm. Her focus areas include high-growth software, ...
New data from TMTG and Rumble can help us understand how right-leaning social media services with long-term goals of building less restricted digital infrastructure are faring.
Music startup Baton secured $4.2 million in funding, the company announced today. Baton will use the new capital to further develop its product, grow its team and roll out new features. Baton ̵...
When OpenAI connected ChatGPT to the internet, it supercharged the AI chatbot’s capabilities. Now, the search engine You.com wants to do the same for every large language model (LLM) out ther...
Atlas, a 3D generative AI platform, is launching with $6 million in seed funding after two years in stealth. The funding consists of two rounds: a $4.5 million round led by 6th Man Ventures (6MV) a...
Keychain seeks to use artificial intelligence to help brands find their perfect manufacturing partners.
Giskard is a French startup working on an open source testing framework for large language models. It can alert developers of risks of biases, security holes and a model’s ability to generate harmf...
E-commerce in Southeast Asia grew rapidly during the pandemic, and that momentum is continuing. A McKinsey report found that between now and 2026, the market is expected to triple at a compound gro...
Craig Douglas Contributor Craig Douglas is a partner at World Fund and an adviser to the EU Commission on Energy policy. World Fund invests in climate technologies with significant climate performa...
Not every request will result in a new connection, but with patience and consistency, your pool of investors will begin to grow.
If the savings are even half as good as Battery seems to think that they may prove, startups could be in for a more efficient, and more valuable, future.
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers news from the weekend and the week to come.
Mark Peter Davis, Interplay founder and managing partner, says the firm stands out with its outsized value proposition relative to its check size.
The World Economic Forum states that Africa has an average annual demand for 2.4 million cars and 300,000 commercial vehicles. This demand is increasing because of a continent-wide increase in disp...
What if a little bit of investment, a splash of mentoring and practical support, a slew of introductions, and a whole lot of belief could be used to help artists with their careers?
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Samara raised $41 million “to bring high quality ADUs to every backyard in California and beyond.” ADUs refer to accessory dwelling units, or more plainly, backyard homes.
There is a growing group of startups looking to expand the BNPL model into other categories.
According to the SBA, veterans are roughly 45% more likely to form their own business compared to people who haven’t served in the military.
Veterans already possess many of the skills and attributes needed to be a successful entrepreneur — including having courage.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. If you’ve been following along with this newsletter, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been a little bit curious about AI ...
It’s not enough to just know your business model and potential TAM. You also have to consider your personal goals.
Given today’s harsh economy and reduced VC spending, startups need a critical eye when purchasing SaaS and cloud infrastructure.
The most successful startups today focus on incremental enhancements that create real value, not just rapid, unsustainable growth.
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
Phospholutions’ pitch deck embodies the essence of an effective pitch. But it’s also riddled with small issues that add up,
EduFi, a fintech startup that enables financially strapped students to secure loans for their education, has raised $6.1 million in a pre-seed round led by Zayn VC with participation from Palm Driv...
It’s not hyperbolic to say that the self-driving car industry is facing a reckoning. Just this week, Cruise recalled its entire fleet of autonomous cars after a grisly accident involving a pe...
Many people, myself included, predicted a wave of startup acquisitions in 2023 as companies rooted in good ideas but built on not-so-good business models ran out of money. That largely didn’t...
The role of HR in enterprises is becoming more strategic. This means that selling effectively requires a less-aggressive approach.
Let’s do a quick summary of results from Arm, Klaviyo, and Instacart, and ask how they perform once we allow for IPO-related costs.
Mani Doraisamy Contributor Share on X Mani Doraisamy is the founder of Neartail. He is a developer-turned-founder and still writes code for a living. Additionally, he serves as a mentor for Google ...
The startup launched out of stealth with a personalized platform to eliminate the guesswork for people who want to treat and manage their health conditions using evidence-based nutrition protocols....
The heady, futuristic world of artificial intelligence brings us a new promise: The ability to be perfectly average.
Picsart, a photo-editing startup backed by SoftBank, is launching a new suite of AI-powered tools for businesses and individuals. The suite, called Picsart Ignite, includes 20 tools that are design...
Developers have been increasingly using third-party APIs to build their applications, and depending on the API, the costs can escalate quickly. It’s been challenging for companies to find way...
Chptr, an app for sharing and holding onto memories of lost loved ones, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The app is designed to give people a way to encapsulate the life of their loved ones...
Snaptrude — a startup aiming to compete against traditional platforms in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) design sector, including Autodesk, Trimble and Nemetschek — with its mo...
While the idea of owning rental properties is appealing to many Americans, the ability to vet and afford such investments in single-family homes is out of reach for a large part of the population. ...
In 2021, robotics startups were flying high. Unlike other categories that had buckled under the strains of a global pandemic, interest in automation was at an all-time high, as companies attempted ...
Notable among the Klarna IPO chatter is the fact that it is far from the only private company worth billions that we are watching approach the public markets.
Startup Zeus Living is the latest casualty in the proptech world. The Airbnb-backed startup is reportedly “winding down operations,” as reported by The Information. TechCrunch has reached out to th...
The U.S. tech industry is facing an unprecedented talent shortage. There’s a dire need for high-skilled immigration.
AI startup Hugging Face offers a wide range of data science hosting and development tools, including a GitHub-like portal for AI code repositories, models and datasets, as well as web dashboards to...
AI is already transforming the way we search, gather information, create, code, decipher data and more, and now it may democratize the process of building an app, too. A new AI-powered startup call...
Will AI make resumes and cover letters even less useful than they were before? Quite possibly. Case in point, EarnBetter, a startup founded by former Credit Karma employees, is developing a platfor...
Tracy Young Contributor Share on X Tracy Young is the co-founder and CEO of TigerEye, the go-to-market platform that helps companies make strategic decisions and is currently offering early access....
The Equity crew is seeing encouraging signs from the fintech startup market, starting with Klarna’s Q3 results.
Upciti is a French startup that has been working on a hardware sensor for city centers that is easy to install and maintain. This hardware module acts as the cornerstone of Upciti’s data management...
Ozone, the maker of an AI-powered collaborative video editor in the cloud, has raised $7.1 million in seed funding and is launching in open beta. The Y Combinator alum aims to provide content creat...
Developers are ready to embrace AI tools, spurred by the dual promises of increased productivity and faster learning. According to one recent survey, 77% of devs feel favorably about using AI in th...
The company expects to market 1 million kilograms of food monthly through its platform by the first quarter of 2024.
Facebook parent Meta is teaming up with Hugging Face and European cloud infrastructure company Scaleway to launch a new AI-focused startup program at the Station F startup megacampus in Paris. The ...
The U.S. index fund pioneer Vanguard has cut the worth of its holding in the Indian ride-hailing startup Ola by nearly two-thirds since original investment, and Neuberger Berman has slashed the wor...
Host Becca Szkutak is joined by our old friend Darrell Etherington to talk with Nasrat Khalid of Aseel.
Before being known as the bank that collapsed, Silicon Valley Blank made a name for itself as a bank that helps support underrepresented founders.
High interest rates may be stifling some investments in climate tech today, but the new fund suggests that LPs see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Social media app Spill has come to be a bright spot for users in the post-Twitter era.
Did WeWork’s business ever make sense? To answer that question, we’ll go over its S-1 filings, its SPAC deal and early earnings reports.
Implementing a new SaaS product into a company often requires a shift in workflows and behaviors, and such change can be met with resistance.
Multiple studies show that younger generations aren’t buying homes as quickly as their generational predecessors. Yet a relatively new startup, Summer, thinks it can convince this cohort to s...
In the midst of an AI chip shortage, Microsoft wants to give a privileged few startups free access to “supercomputing” resources from its Azure cloud for developing AI models. Microsoft...
Can AI provide a better filesystem and workspace for personal productivity? That’s what a new startup, Fabric, launching today, aims to offer. The company has designed an AI-powered service t...
ReturnGO provides a “post-purchase operating system” that aims to reduce the reverse logistics costs for online retailers while also making the whole process more sustainable.
The mass move to digital during the pandemic and the embrace of generative AI accelerated cloud adoption, and the trend hasn’t reversed. On the contrary, Gartner estimates that, in 2023, glob...
Upon opening its first overseas office in London last Thursday, a16z made its first U.K. investment announcement today. The venture capital firm has led a $4.2 million seed round in Pimlico. Based ...
Several years ago, Daniil Bratchenko, one of the first employees at DataRobot, the AI and data science platform, observed that enterprises adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps experienced a p...
There’s a new unicorn in town, and its name is Enable. A rebate management platform, Enable today announced that it raised $120 million in a Series D funding round that values the company at ...
Xpressbees, an Indian logistics firm that works with several e-commerce firms in the country, has raised $80 million in a new funding round led by Ontario Teachers’ late-stage venture growth ...
Shares of Honasa Consumer, the parent firm of direct-to-customer beauty and personal care Mamaearth, jumped slightly in a key public listing watched by many Indian startups as they evaluate their o...
Flexible office-space firm WeWork has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing over $18.6 billion of debt in a remarkable collapse for the once high-flying startup co-founded by Adam Neu...
Klarna’s Q3 2023 results are the latest in a growing list of evidence that the Swedish fintech giant is evolving into a durable company ready for an IPO.
The startup’s solution takes over where project proposal software leaves off, from the first site visit until the solar array is running and on the grid.
Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week.
German AI startup Aleph Alpha has raised a Series B funding round of $500 million from a consortium of seven new investors, as well as existing investors from previous rounds. Founded in 2019, Alep...
Zelig users can create different outfit combinations and then save them to their profile and even share them before purchasing complete looks.
It’s tough to recover from catastrophic system failures when you’re flying blind. Yet, many companies admit they’re doing just that — flying blind, more or less — wher...
Appetite, an app for discovering and booking restaurants, is aiming to streamline the process of planning nights out with friends and family. After beta testing the app with 14,000 users, the start...
U.K. femcare-turned-gynaecological-health startup, Daye, has expanded its tampon-based home screening service to add STI testing. The startup is billing this “non-invasive screening” se...
Vegan cheese isn’t usually anything to write home about, in terms of taste and texture. Dreamfarm, a startup based in Parma, in the Food Valley of Italy, is hoping to change that. It’s ...
If you’re looking to make a significant difference in the world, your startup could be the vehicle that drives that change.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
While Luko could still sell itself, it seems less likely to receive a “very competitive offer.”
Defense tech startups raised sizable rounds in 2023, which shows VCs are interested in the sector despite market conditions.
Indian edtech giant Byju’s said on Saturday that revenue of its core business, its largest, in the financial year ending March 2022, stood at $429.18 million, making it clear that the most va...
The key to a successful startup lies in its team and their ability to answer pivotal questions about the startup’s purpose and challenges.
Electric mobility startup Revel is officially shutting down its shared moped business in New York City and San Francisco, according to a company-wide email that CEO and co-founder Frank Reig sent F...
When the time comes for you to step down, it’s essential that everyone is on the same page about what your successor should be like.
Michael Koch Contributor Share on X Michael Koch is the co-founder and CEO of HubKonnect, an AI-enabled local store marketing platform. When you take venture capital money, investors will shape eve...
The Equity crew is rounding up the week’s biggest startup and tech news, from WeWork’s struggle to stay alive to deals from Charlie and Almouneer.
For this edition of Pitch Deck Teardown, we’re taking a close look at the CancerVAX campaign on the equity crowdfunding platform, StartEngine.
When TechCrunch covered Carepatron’s pre-seed last year, the startup was focused on serving solo practitioners and small health practices. Now the healthcare management system has scaled along with...
We’ve witnessed an incredible unicorn stampede over the last 10 years.
Stability AI, the startup behind the text-to-image AI model Stable Diffusion, thinks 3D model creation tools could be the next big thing in generative AI. At least, that’s the message it̵...
Countless startups are trying to solve hard robotics problems in industry. But few are looking to bring the tech into homes. Well, few except for Matic. A relatively new venture founded by Navneet ...
There are plenty of angel investors out there who are more confident than VCs. Here are tips on raising a substantial round by focusing on angel investors.
From a handful of billion-dollar startups to a stampede to an aging cohort — what an insane, fun, and wild decade it has been.
Flavrs, an iOS app that lets foodies discover recipes and then shop for ingredients, is introducing a new takeout feature and AI-powered recommendation systems thanks to a custom integration with O...
Developer velocity, the speed at which an organization ships code, is often impacted by necessary but lengthy processes like code review, writing documentation and testing. Inefficiencies threaten ...
The Wyoming-based startup thinks the traditional three-bladed turbine is played out and has a new design to bring wind energy to more places.
Over the past seven years, the company built integrations with the largest payroll companies in the U.S. to provide a direct two-way connection between payroll and benefits automation.
The U.S. government signs more than 11 million contracts a year worth a combined hundreds of billions of dollars, a veritable goldmine for vendors. But federal contracting is a notoriously tough la...
Developers spend a lot of time on mundane, repetitive tasks — and surprisingly little on actual coding. In Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey, 63% of respondents said that they devo...
While the number of cybersecurity funding deals reached a high point in 2022, that doesn’t mean that the sector’s tapped out — far from it. According to Statista, there were 148 d...
Dashtoon wants to make anyone with a story to tell into a comic-artist, even if they can’t draw. It provides aspiring comics creator with a suite of generative AI tools, and a publishing platform t...
SBI Holdings, a Japanese financial services conglomerate and one of the largest venture capital firms in the East Asian country, has made a $40 million multifund commitment to anchor Pan-African VC...
Supply chain logistics platform Flexport is acquiring the assets of shuttered digital freight network Convoy, according to a memo Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen sent to staff Wednesday. Flexport will r...
Ford is buying and burying Auto Motive Power, or “AMP” for short, to bolster its charging, battery management and power conversion tech. The secretive energy startup once claimed to pow...
Exits are few and far between and founders are burnt out. Even if they don’t have immediate plans to leave, planning for it makes it easier.
Show journalists and their readers that sustainability is no longer a side issue or just a worthy cause. It’s our duty to help Mother Earth.
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
Given the company’s performance in the past few quarters, what did you think was going to happen?
Media software startup and streamer Plex is expanding its service to become more of a social network, not just a way to organize your home media or stream free content. Today, the app maker is laun...
Welcome to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. Mary Ann and Alex invited ALIAVIA Ventures co-founder Marisa Warren on the show.
The San Francisco-based venture capital firm invests in companies focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and frontier technologies.
Vespa.ai, the big data serving engine that just a few weeks ago spun out from Yahoo (full disclosure: TechCrunch’s parent company) into an independent venture, has raised a new round of funds...
Funding for cybersecurity startups continues to look bleak. According to a recent Crunchbase survey, companies in the digital security space raised 30% less funds — $1.9 billion — in Q3...
EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children, has raised $4.5 million in a seed extension round that was partially funded by its user base. The app lets parents cre...
Companies are increasingly struggling with procurement — the strategic process of acquiring goods and services to execute tasks across the organization. According to a recent survey from proc...
Freeplay, a startup that lets companies build, experiment with and test apps powered by generative AI models, specifically text-generating models, today emerged from stealth with $3.25 million in a...
Should you devote a considerable amount of time to YouTube, you’ll likely encounter videos in which the creators discuss the sponsors supporting their content. Agentio is building a platform ...
Grants are the lifeblood of many organizations. But procuring them often turns out to be a time-consuming, labor-intensive process. Writing a proposal can take hundreds of hours, require the servic...
Every year, Temasek teams up with Bain & Company on the e-Conomy SEA report. It covers Southeast Asia’s digital economy and is published by Google. This year’s report, published today, undersco...
WeWork is on the verge of filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New Jersey, according to sources cited by The Wall Street Journal. If WeWork does indeed file, it shouldn’t come as a shock to cl...
Comcast, a division of NBCUniversal, which broadcasts multiple sports, developed an accelerator to help encourage sports tech startups.
The decline in VC funding for cybersecurity startups might finally be reversing course after months of discouraging trend lines. Recently, Crunchbase reported that cybersecurity startups raised nea...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Abhi Ramesh, the founder and CEO at Misfits Market, the e-commerce site where customers ca...
It’s been over a year since Adobe announced that it intended to buy Figma for $20 billion, yet the two companies are still separate entities.
Does Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have regrets over his creation? The entrepreneur and founder of venture fund Seven Seven Six, speaking at an event at the University of Virginia, espoused a fa...
Getting the required permits for construction can take an excruciatingly long time in many cities — whether it’s for a residential or commercial project. One new proptech startup is out to ma...
For startup founders, the ability to inspire has everything to do with the ability to get others to see the world the way you do.
It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI. It was reve...
Most consumers interact with e-commerce brands through social media, text and email. Brands reach out with promotions and discounts. But the engagement and read rates tend to be low; according to G...
Less than six months after launching to the public and announcing a $7.5 million seed raise, a startup providing banking services to Americans over the age of 62 has raised additional funding. The ...
In the U.S., figuring out ways to pay for health insurance is a perennial problem — not just for individuals, but for the businesses employing them. Companies pay upwards of $22,000 per emplo...
Organizations today rely on a growing number of apps to get work done. According to Statista, in 2022, companies were licensing an average of 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, up from just eig...
Cedar has coverage across Austin now, however, the new capital will enable the company to expand to more cities over the next 12 to18 months.
Brazilian banking-as-a-service startup QI Tech has raised $200 million in a Series B round of funding led by New York-based General Atlantic. The raise is believed to be the largest in Brazil ̵...
Obesity and prediabetes are major health concerns in Africa and the Middle East, affecting more than 40% of the population. In Egypt, 20% of adults have diabetes; the figure in Saudi Arabia is 30%....
Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that started its life as eFounders, just shared a list of the six next companies that will emerge from the studio. It’s an interesting mix of enterprise SaaS st...
Can an AI be your mentor? That’s what a startup called Practica believes. The company, which evolved out of a marketplace for one-on-one executive coaching, has now launched an AI system buil...
Operations intelligence aims to optimize information flow, address bottlenecks, and eliminate obstacles to progress.
Honasa Consumer, the parent firm of skin and personal care brand Mamaearth, has raised about $92 million in an anchor round ahead of its initial public offering starting Tuesday in a major boost to...
Founders are inherently optimists, but they should plan for worst-case scenarios so they aren’t blindsided if something does happen.
We’re looking at a massive earnings week, the Biden administration’s order regarding AI, Web Summit’s new CEO, and more.
Web Summit has named a new CEO: Katherine Maher — previously CEO and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation (between 2019 and 2021). Maher is also chair of the board of the foundation...
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
The last quarter in venture capital was quite gloomy. Even AI didn’t change the picture that much, but its impact is starting to show in other ways.
Kenyan B2B e-commerce company MarketForce has shut down operations in three of its five markets in Africa and is in the early stages of launching a social commerce spinout. TechCrunch has learned t...
Popup Bagels raised $8 million in venture capital this week. But why would a bagel store chain want such expensive capital?
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. For my column this week, I told the story of how an ex-colleague was impersonated by an AI-powered spambot and almost ...
Good morning, and welcome to the end of another week! In an overall quiet year, the last few months have been pretty spicy when it comes to M&A activity: Atlassian bought Loom; Cisco bought Spl...
Arc, the web browser startup that’s convincing some power users to give up Chrome, is now inviting other non-Arc users to test drive its capabilities with the launch of a trio of new “s...
The product needs to be great, but without sales, the business doesn’t generate those nosebleed valuations.
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, where we talk about the week’s biggest news.
Like many entrepreneurs, Byterat’s founders realized that the challenges they had faced themselves in the lab were a business opportunity.
This pitch deck makes for some really interesting reading and storytelling, so let’s dive in and see if we can spot what happened and how.
Rapido, the eight-year-old Indian bike taxi startup, is expanding into the cab market in the South Asian nation, where Uber and its homegrown competitor Ola dominate. The Bengaluru-based startup ha...
It seems that as long as rapid revenue growth is possible in the earliest stages of startup life, valuations are going to be strong.
As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s becoming more adept at generating human-like text.
Nectar AI will help brands find new ways to personally engage and convert consumers where they spend the most time.
The exit market for SaaS dried up in the second half of 2022, which saw the lowest exit activity since 2016.
AI-powered photo-sorting app GoodOnes raised $3.6 million in seed funding earlier this year and dropped into the Apple App Store in April. Six months and 400 million photo sorts later, it is changi...
Credal.ai, a Y Combinator-backed startup that gives enterprises a way to connect their internal data to text-generating, cloud-hosted AI models, has raised $4.8 million in a seed round led by Spark...
Getting answers to tough, qualitative questions about products from users can be costly, both in terms of time and money. At least, that was the experience of Aaron Cannon, a former strategist at D...
Insurtech has had a rocky few years. Several startups in the space raised a lot of money and tried their luck on the public markets, but found that investors were unwilling to grant them valuations...
Ola Electric said on Thursday that it has raised $384.43 million in a funding round, which included about $240 million in debt. The new round values the Bengaluru-headquartered electric vehicle sta...
Tech employees who are in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion are tired. They have been talking with internal stakeholders and promoting diversity across the board. But it’s hard to prove tha...
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Korean telco KT are among the investors of Moreh, which builds an AI software tool that optimizes and creates AI models. The Santa Clara- and Seoul-based startup sa...
YouTrip, a Singapore-based fintech that offers multicurrency wallet for consumers and business accounts with corporate cards for SMEs, has its eyes on growth throughout Southeast Asia after landing...
There are, in fact, people out there raising lots of capital without employing a deck at all. I was really intrigued to speak to two of them and learn how they did it.
I heard that the USCIS released proposed H-1B regulations that make it easier for founders to get H-1Bs. What are the details?
Computer vision has become commonplace across innumerable industries, but the methods of creating and controlling these visual AI models aren’t so easy. Viso is building a low/no-code end-to-...
As Kubernetes is being deployed for ever more mission critical workloads, keeping clusters up and running has become increasingly important for DevOps teams. Chkk, an early-stage startup, launched ...
A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experience...
The House Fund, the pre-seed and early-stage venture capital fund focused on UC Berkeley startups, specifically AI startups, today announced that it has closed its third tranche — Fund III &#...
Generative AI — is there anything it won’t do? Well, truthfully, most of the time you’re not going to be able to convince it to share its innermost fantasies with you. Try it with ChatGPT, fo...
TechCrunch Early Stage — our flagship event designed for budding entrepreneurs and founders at the very start of their startup journey — returns by popular demand on April 25, 2024. And we’re excit...
Flourish Ventures, an early-stage venture firm investing exclusively in fintech companies in the U.S. and in emerging markets, has secured $350 million in fresh capital, TechCrunch is the first to ...
Welcome to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. This week, we had Theory Ventures founder Tomasz Tunguz on the show.
Garuda Capital invests in pre-seed and seed-stage startups focused on business-to-business in the areas of cloud, climate, apps and commerce.
Many doctors are overwhelmed by paperwork, leaving them stretched thin, with less time to see patients. Based in Melbourne with plans to expand around the world, Heidi Health wants to ease the burd...
Contrary to what you might’ve heard, the era of large seed rounds isn’t over — at least in the AI sector. CentML, a startup developing tools to decrease the cost — and impro...
In 2020, Jay Madheswaran, Matt Noe and David Zeng, all veterans of the tech industry, had a vision to harness the power of large language models (à la OpenAI’s ChatGPT) to shake up the legal ...
The social commerce market size in Africa is expected to continue growing as businesses and micro-entrepreneurs embrace digital media, driven by the rising usage of apps like WhatsApp, TikTok and I...
Whether we like it or not, the leather industry significantly contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and global waste generation. The current methods used to fulfil the increasing demand for...
Created by the founder of Thunes, global digital currency payments institution Triple-A wants to close the gap between traditional finance and blockchain-based payments with its white-label solutio...
Investment advisers who seek to innovate will need to tread carefully in this space to avoid missteps, which could have significant consequences for their viability.
The U.S. construction landscape looks much different this week compared to last Friday, following the amendments to the Davis-Bacon Act that went into effect earlier this week.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom talk about the seemingly endless slate of rainy Saturdays here on the east coast. Thankfully, this episo...
Good morning, and happy Tuesday! Today we’re looking at Q3 venture data coming out of Europe. Overall, European venture capital data is down sharply. But as my colleagues Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm...
Signos, a metabolic health platform that utilizes a unique AI-engine with a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to offer real-time data and recommendations for healthy weight management, has announced...
As part of France’s budget for 2024, which was passed last week by the French government without a vote, France plans to create a new tax relief system for angel investments in tech startups. In ma...
The grip Twitter, now called X, has on the market may be stronger than some believed. Unfortunately, that’s led to the first casualty among Twitter alternatives, as the startup Pebble (former...
We can’t wait to find out if these companies will report a material improvement from their investments in AI-related computing tasks and products.
Do you get tired of creating an account every time you purchase something from an online store? You’re not alone. I Own My Data (IOMD) is a startup aiming to eliminate the tedious step for consumer...
Investments in cybersecurity companies are beginning to turn a corner, seemingly. After a brutal summer, VC funding to security startups saw a slight (12%) uptick from Q3, according to Crunchbase &...
Text-generating AI is one thing. But AI models that understand images as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. Take, for example, Twelve Labs. The San Francisco-based startup trains AI...
As cloud-based software becomes the norm for many functions inside of modern businesses, data silos are growing into an outsize problem. This is particularly true in the financial industry, where v...
D-ID, the Tel Aviv-based startup best known as the tech behind those viral videos of animated family photos, is bringing its AI video technology to a new mobile app, launching today. Originally ava...
Much has been made of AI-powered videos that can either make a real person speak different words or other languages, or generate a synthetic person that can speak on-demand. A few years ago former ...
Byju’s CFO Ajay Goel, who joined the edtech giant in April this year, has already resigned, the two said Tuesday, in the latest setback for the startup that is grappling with scores of challe...
The central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) handle different types of data. The CPU is used in almost all devices including computers, cellphones, tablets, smartwatches...
One key area of private-market performance that we haven’t yet given enough attention to is the matter of exits.
In the end, it all comes back to relationships. The more you can help VCs, founders, and the startup community as a whole, the more you’ll build your name.
The Rounds, a sustainable “household restocking” service, wants to prove that last-mile logistics can be done both efficiently and profitably. Now, it’s claiming a significant mil...
In the past year, Finerio created an API hub for digital payments, credit and personal finance management, as well as a place for financial institutions to comply with new open banking regulations....
Ternary, a platform that helps companies manage how much they’re spending on cloud resources across multiple public cloud providers, today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A f...
The company added a B2B component called Nomad Agent, which provides a network for real estate agents to collaborate with one another and standardize commission-sharing.
ZenML wants to be the glue that makes all the open-source AI tools stick together. This open-source framework lets you build pipelines that will be used by data scientists, machine-learning enginee...
AI and other deep technologies are the prevailing themes in the new early-stage cohort from Peak XV Partners, as the largest India and Southeast Asia-focused VC fund intensifies its search for oppo...
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
German insurtech company Getsafe is still bullish about direct-to-consumer insurance, but others are moving away from this business model.
Paddy Cosgrave has stepped down as CEO of Web Summit, the 14-year-old conference business that he co-founded and which has gone on to host one of Europe’s biggest annual tech events, along wi...
Tucker Carlson has raised $15 million for a new subscription-based entity. But he’ll need more than name recognition for it to succeed.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. For VCs, market size is crucial, because it becomes a proxy for how big a company could possibly get, which in turn is...
Good morning, and welcome to Friday! Atlassian’s purchase of Loom last week raised eyebrows, and not just because it missed unicorn status by a hair. But overall, it makes sense that Atlassian boug...
Having your contract periodically reviewed by a technology and a tax attorney is important to help minimize your tax liability.
There are some major, fundamental problems with this deck that makes the company pretty much impossible to invest in.
Funding to Black founders is only getting worse after the promises made in 2020.
Equity is a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. On our Friday show we talk about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
The availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made it easier for developers to make chatbots. Large companies such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have made ChatGPT, Bard and Bing Chat widel...
Perovskite silicon tandem solar cell technology is a mouthful, but it’s basically perovskite crystals layered on top of silicon cells. The combination captures energy from the sun more efficiently ...
Product Hunt, the product discovery site for smaller startups, apps, tech tools and developers’ side projects, is cleaning house. The company earlier this month announced layoffs, but didn...
Pebble, the California-based EV startup founded by a veteran of Apple, Cruise and Zoox, unveiled Thursday a prototype of its flagship product: an all-electric travel trailer designed for an off-gri...
Creating the many types of content needed for large-scale B2B campaigns often results in marketers juggling dozens of tools. This makes it difficult to ensure cohesive messaging across their emails...
iink integrates with mortgage servicing banks and insurance carriers to create an entirely digital and automated workflow to keep the restoration process moving along.
Alexa Irish and Laura Speyer, now the co-CEOs of Catch, acquired the company in June after the original co-founders shuttered the company.
When Warmly started a couple of years ago, people were meeting regularly in Zoom and the company provided a custom background and information about the participants. It was useful as far as it went...
A January Ventures survey found that the fundraising market is starting to turn back in founder’s favors but not all founders are so sure.
Vopero intends to launch in Chile by the end of the year with a goal to put 1,000 of its items in “corners” of physical retailers like Paris.
Expense management startup Navan has inked an exclusive deal with Citi that executives say will open its addressable market significantly. Specifically, the fintech and the card giant are announcin...
Sidebar, a company developing a group coaching program focused on driving individual career growth, today announced that it raised $13.55 million in a seed round from investors including Foundation...
Here’s an interesting move. Founders Future, a well-known VC firm in the French tech ecosystem, acquired an equity crowdfunding marketplace called Sowefund. While terms of the deal remain undisclos...
Plume, a startup founded to offer essential online healthcare services to trans people across the U.S., laid off more than two dozen workers in October, several sources close to the company told Te...
In August, we reported that a four-year-old, venture-backed remodeling startup called Made Renovation was failing its customers, by their own telling. Though it marketed itself as a one-stop shop t...
In this column, Sophie provides some context on export control, the J-1 educational and cultural exchange visa, and employment authorization.
A CFO, recent notes on limited burn, and enough historical information to indicate that the company is IPO-sized already? Things are looking good for a Plaid IPO.
As a part of TC’s ongoing AI survey series, we spoke to a group of five investors about the pros and cons of open source AI business models.
Fintech startup Plaid has hired former Expedia CFO Eric Hart to serve as its first chief financial officer. When asked if the move meant that the company was planning to go public, a spokesperson t...
Hospitality startup Anyplace began its life as a marketplace that gives people the option to book hotels or rentals for a minimum of 30 days nearly anyplace they want. In early 2022, the company p...
OpenAI’s GPT-4V is being hailed as the next big thing in AI: a “multimodal” model that can understand both text and images. This has obvious utility, which is why a pair of open s...
This week, Equity was joined by Gené Teare, a well-known analyst of the global venture capital market from Crunchbase and Crunchbase News.
The Alliance encourages firms and investors to collect diversity data and increase the number of women and minorities hired and funded annually.
RevRoad was started in 2017 as a venture services firm for startups in Utah. The organization offered a two-year program with access to 12 resources ranging from legal services to sales help to men...
Statement, a startup developing a platform for enterprise cash flow management, today announced that it raised $12 million in seed funding. Glilot Capital Partners contributed to the tranche with p...
Chronic hormonal conditions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis are common in women, but also commonly go undiagnosed or inadequately treated. Allara, a New York–based tele...
Passwordless authentication offers a host of advantages over traditional pins, passphrases and passcodes. Surveys around the web show that compromised passwords cause an estimated 81% of all breach...
Peak XV Partners has invested $35 million in Neo, a fintech startup founded by industry veterans that is increasingly challenging incumbents including IIFL, Edelweiss and Waterfield Advisors, as th...
Objective (previously named Kailua Labs), a multimodal search platform built by machine learning experts from Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon and Twilio, emerged from stealth today with $13 million in ...
Last week, cloud computing company Shadow confirmed a data breach involving customers’ personal information. The hacker claims to have access to the data of more than 530,000 customers. According t...
Flanks gathers global wealth data under one API so that clients can have a complete view of their investment portfolio in real time and make more intelligent investment decisions.
WeWork has sent a cease and desist letter to rival Codi in response to the startup’s recent marketing campaign it dubs “WeWont,” TechCrunch has exclusively learned. In the letter dated Octobe...
Good morning! We have lots of good stuff for you this Tuesday, so let’s dig right in. Up first, we surveyed six investors who are placing bets on AI. We wanted to know how startups should begin bui...
If you follow sports even a little, you know the influence of analytics and data has changed the way sports works. As teams build bigger and bigger analytics departments, and data becomes tied to o...
Governments need to create environments where founders and their teams can imagine building lasting and successful businesses.
Patreon is acquiring Los Angeles-based livestream ticketed event platform Moment, the company announced on Tuesday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Patreon says the acquisition ...
The Los Angeles-based company has created six brands since the company was founded in 2014, including moonbowls (Korean cuisine), Cauliflower Pizza and lulubowls (Hawaiian-inspired dishes).
Data can provide a wealth of insights into the financial health of customers, along with information about how they spend their money and where. The only question is, what to do with all of it?...
Fingerprint, a device intelligence API, helps developers build security solutions using information from hardware accessing a website. The primary goal is to help prevent fraud. Today, the Chicago-...
Nearly a year ago, developers Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros released a hobby project called Riffusion that could generate music using not audio but images of audio. It sounds counterintuitive (no...
Roughly eight years ago, a little-known startup called Procurify raised $4 million for its platform that hosts tools to take some of the pain out of enterprise procurement. The company never became...
Reality Defender, one of several startups developing tools to attempt to detect deepfakes and other AI-generated content, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led ...
Moving from one country to another is difficult in many ways, not the least of which involves starting over financially. Nova Credit, which started out as a graduate research project out of Stanfor...
Investors have an appetite for databases, it seems. Today, ScyllaDB, a startup developing database tech for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, announced that it raised $43 million in a funding...
Conditions appear to be shifting favorably for India’s Swiggy. The food delivery startup — backed by SoftBank, Prosus and Accel — saw its paper valuation slashed by more than half...
Developer community site Stack Overflow has laid off 28% of its staff, the Prosus-owned company announced Monday. In a blog post, Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar indicated that t...
Agnikul, an Indian space tech startup developing small-lift launch vehicles, has raised $26.7 million in fresh investment as it looks to begin commercial launches using its customizable satellite r...
Web Summit, the big tech conference brand that runs events in several cities and whose 70,000 person flagship event in Lisbon is taking place next month, is running into a wall — a wall of ou...
Arjun Thyagarajan and Raghav Lal, the co-founders of fintech startup Solid, are pushing back at investor FTV Capital’s lawsuit with a counterclaim of their own.
Let’s take this occasion to raise a glass to a great idea that took only two decades to triumph, and examine the knock-on effects of that great idea.
Per PitchBook, through Q3 2023, seed-stage startups clocked a median pre-money valuation of $12 million, beating 2022’s record of $11.1 million.
Cincinnati, Ohio-based Pantomath, a data observability and traceability platform, today announced it raised $14 million in a Series A round led by Sierra Ventures with participation from Bowery Cap...
Smartphone sales have had their worst quarterly performance in over a decade, a fact that raises two big questions. Have the latest models finally bored the market with mere incremental improvement...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news.
Creative Force helps retailers and brands create content at scale for marketing campaigns and online merchandising.
Accessercise, which developed a fitness app for people who want to exercise despite their disabilities, was one of the Startup Battlefield 200 finalists at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023.
The compliance process at pharmaceutical manufacturers is complicated because many still use paper-based systems to record manufacturing steps. These paper records are reviewed by FDA auditors to e...
Any conversation centered on the U.K. tech scene often has a strong center of gravity around the south of the country — to many, “the U.K.” and “London” may as well be...
Founders get bombarded with invitations to events, and not all of them are worth it, but there are ways to figure out which will provide value.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
It is too early to tell how long the Israel-Hamas war may last, but it is likely to make democracies’ need for defense tech even clearer.
Gaza, despite being one of the most economically challenged regions in the world, has ironically always been a tech hub — not only for Palestine and Palestinians, but also for the world: Inte...
Ripcord, a startup developing robots that can automatically digitize paper records, is hoping to raise $20 million to $25 million in a new funding round that would value the company at $110 million...
Synapse and Evolve addressed allegations that claimed the companies were at odds with each other after Evolve decided to end the relationship.
Volteras aims to be the connective tissue between electric vehicles and everything they might touch — from chargers and home batteries to energy retailers and mapping apps. While flying under the r...
We asked six venture capitalists who are active in the AI investing space to walk us through what they are seeing in the market today.
The full picture regarding capital availability for African startups is far from encouraging, but there are always green shoots to highlight.
The world is still coming to terms with Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israelis last weekend — and everything else that has unfolded so far in the aftermath, including the barrage of retaliation st...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. A few months ago, Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, tweeted that if he could go back in time and do one thing ...
Caroline Ellison explained how she cooked the books to make Alameda’s finances look a lot cleaner than they actually were.
For entrepreneurs, innovators and businesses to thrive and unlock the economic potential that comes from creating new industries, we need a consistent approach from the government.
Stash, an investing app, is taking advantage of a tool that’s been around for some time – a convertible note. The company told TechCrunch exclusively that it just raised $40 million through one of ...
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups. This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
Is it time to normalize the idea of cultivated meat? Depends on who you ask.
Tradeshift, a late-stage fintech startup that has raised over $1 billion in venture and debt, has dismissed its co-founder Christian Lanng, citing “serious allegations of sexual assault and harassm...
Your pitch may well be the first time a VC has even heard of a concept, so how can they possibly work out how to invest in your idea when it sounds like sci-fi?
Israeli biotech startup Mana.bio has been planning to launch its programmable drug treatment solution for months, and decided to forge ahead in spite of the attacks that happened this past weekend ...
Two of the biggest drivers of growth on social and e-commerce platforms have been food and influencers, so it should come as no surprise that startups are now getting in on the act in trying to com...
Atlassian announced this morning that it is acquiring video messaging service Loom for $975 million, the same company that had a $1.53 billion valuation in May 2021 when it announced a $130 million...
Investing apps help anyone access the stock market to make trades. Alpaca, a San Mateo-based startup, offers stock and crypto brokerage trading services via API that enables investing fintech compa...
Big buildings almost always have big carbon footprints, and getting the carbon out of heating and cooling is especially challenging. Geothermal might be the answer.
Deasie, a startup developing tools to give companies greater control over text-generating AI models, today announced that it raised $2.9 million in a seed funding round with participation from Y Co...
Large language models (LLMs) are the driving force behind the burgeoning generative AI movement, capable of interpreting and creating human-language texts from simple prompts — this could be ...
The startup is developing pricing software to give online retailers an easy way to clear out inventory and increase profits without having to put those items on sale.
Lyon, France-based precision fermentation startup Bon Vivant, which is using biotech techniques to reprogram yeast microorganisms to produce animal-free milk proteins with a substantially lower env...
Access to education in Bangladesh is filled with inequalities, say the founders of edtech 10 Minute School. Many rural areas don’t have good learning centers and as a result, students travel to cap...
Character.AI, the a16z-backed AI chatbot startup from ex-Google AI researchers, is out today with a new feature for its subscribers. The chatbot platform, which offers customizable AI companions wi...
If your company isn’t seeing strong growth with customers eager to use the product, it might be time to pivot the company in a new direction.
To find out how the industry is reacting to this decision, TechCrunch+ spoke with one founder and four fund managers at venture firms that back women or founders of color.
Indian startup ecosystem had a lackluster third-quarter in fundraising terms; total capital raised by Indian startups in the Q3 2023 was off more than 50% compared to the year-ago period.
Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an “AI-native” software development environment, called Cursor, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenA...
For small- to medium-sized local manufacturers, cultivating their network of customers is key to scaling up. But maintaining customer relationships means a lot of tasks that quickly snowball: gener...
Sony Group announced today that it has established Sony Innovation Fund: Africa (SIF: AF), a program that will support the growth of entertainment businesses in Africa. Appropriately, the Tokyo mul...
Katapult, the Oslo-based global investment firm with a penchant for fostering early-stage, high-impact, climate-focused tech startups, is doubling down on its ocean and climate investments. From 2,...
Prophecy, a low-code development platform for companies to transform their data, today announced that it raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners and SignalFire, with ...
The labor shortage in construction isn’t a problem that’s unique to the U.S.; it’s very much a global issue.
AMD yesterday acquired Nod.ai, an open source AI software provider, as the chipmaker looks to bolster its efforts to build an ecosystem of AI development tools, libraries and models around its hard...
Medium has gone through a number of versions over the years, but what has been a steady focus in Medium’s life in recent years has been its subscription business.
New York-based peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace Pickle, which lets users earn passive income from their closets, is readying an expansion with the close of an $8 million seed round. The comp...
Let’s take a deep dive into how founders can beef up their qualifications for the O-1A to build their startup, reach traction, and scale.
A new automation startup is setting out to eat Zapier’s lunch, formally launching to the public today after an extended period in beta. Relay, as the company is called, touts itself as a work...
Aampe, a marketing automation platform for mobile apps, recently closed a $7.5 million funding round led by Matrix India and Peak XV, the company announced last week. Bringing Aampe’s total r...
KIT Plugins, a music software development startup, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Copycat Holdings. The Nashville-based startup offers digital audio emulations of rare analog gear to ...
Carefull, a fintech platform that aims to help banks protect older customers from fraud, scams and “money mistakes,” today announced that it raised $16.5 million in a Series A round led...
In a perfect world, companies would vet the security and compliance of every third-party vendor they use. Sales wouldn’t close until these reviews are complete. The trouble is, security revie...
Yooga provides software for restaurants to manage orders, send orders to the kitchen, last-mile delivery and control inventory and cash flow.
Germany, France and Italy are among the countries which last year enacted laws to stop the practice of culling male day-old chicks, because, as they do not lay eggs, they are considered surplus to ...
InsuranceDekho, the insurer that was incubated within the automobile marketplace group CarDekho, has raised $60 million in a new funding round as the startup looks to supercharge its growth. Mitsub...
Arctic Wolf, a cybersecurity company that’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity, today announced that it plans to acquire Revelstoke, a company developing a security orc...
Before you start planning how you’ll demonstrate your product, you first need to consider whether you need a demo at all.
The TechCrunch+ team has charted the most important VC data we’ve seen thus far in Q3 to help you better understand where global startup investing really is today.
SnapEDA, a platform for electrical engineers to easily access electric component data, is rebranding as SnapMagic and introducing a new suite of features that could be a game changer for electronic...
While Shadow is better known for its high-end cloud PCs with a dedicated Nvidia GPU, the company is introducing a new tier called Shadow PC Essential. As the name suggests, Shadow isn’t targeting g...
We were curious how Canopy was able to raise another tranche of capital in this climate, so we caught up with the company’s CEO, Matt Bivons to find out how things are going.
X competitor Bluesky is rolling out its latest release, version 1.52, with a number of changes, including those focused on improving the safety and security of its microblogging platform. The Jack ...
Much in the same way as companies adapt their software to run across different desktop, mobile and cloud operating systems, businesses also need to configure their software for the fast-moving AI r...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Giovanni Fili, the founder and CEO of Exeger, a startup that creates flexible solar cells ...
The company saw revenue grow 24x between 2020 and 2023, and is expecting to double its year over year revenue at the end of this year.
Contract management startup Harbour today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round that had participation from Getty Images co-founder Jonathan Klein, Scribble Ventures and ...
Twistlock was founded in 2015 with the idea of securing the nascent cloud native computing environment, a notion you could argue was well ahead of its time. When the company was acquired by Palo Al...
Data observability startup Acceldata today announced that it raised $10 million in an extension to its Series C round, bringing its total raised to over $100 million. New investor Prosperty7 Ventur...
Plenful, a startup developing workflow automation tools for healthcare providers, has emerged from stealth with $9 million in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Co-founder and CEO Jo...
Thread (not to be confused with Threads), a startup developing a robotics platform to collect inspection data for utilities, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round l...
Modal Labs, a platform that provides cloud-based infrastructure to data teams and app developers, particularly those creating generative AI applications, has raised $16 million in a Series A fundin...
To ease the burden of maintaining their IT infrastructure, many companies, especially SMBs, turn to third-party IT providers. Called managed service providers (MSPs), they make life easier for thei...
Barcelona-based Heura, a disrupter in the plant-based protein space since 2017, has a product hitting shelves shortly in Spain and France that it reckons will have the most committed meat eaters si...
French startup Orus has raised an $11.6 million Series A funding round (€11 million). The startup offers insurance products specifically designed for small and medium companies. Interestingly, toda...
UAE-based Zest Equity, a startup digitizing private market dealings, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding to build more tools for enabling fast and transparent transactions by ecosystem players ...
Saronic, a startup developing autonomous ships for defense, has raised $55 million in a Series A round led by Caffeinated Capital with participation from 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Ventur...
Braid, a four-year-old startup that aimed to make shared wallets more mainstream among consumers, has shut down. Founded in January 2019 by Amanda Peyton and Todd Berman (who left in 2020), San Fra...
In this issue: Meet Castelion, news from Amazon and more.
Startups must maintain acute awareness of often short-term corporate psychology, embracing adaptability and nurturing internal champions.
Funding to Canadian startups declined by 57% to $808 million in Q3 2023 from the previous quarter, per Tracxn’s Geo Quarterly report.
The company aims to create whole-cut cultivated fish filets, starting with bluefin tuna, using muscle and fat cells.
The U.K. care home sector was pegged as a £7.7 billion market in 2021, according to most recent estimates, yet capacity is shrinking at a time when the average age of the general population continu...
Circular, backed by Y Combinator, is a service that offers consumers in Singapore and Australia subscriptions to high-end electronics, like iPhones, Samsung Galaxy, iPad Pros and MacBook Pros. Not ...
Onsurity, an Indian startup that offers monthly subscription-based insurance solutions to micro, small and medium enterprises, startups and growing businesses, has raised $24 million in a funding r...
Getsafe, a German-based digital insurtech startup, has acquired the German portfolio of Luko, a French insurtech startup that recently neared insolvency before agreeing to be acquired by British in...
There are many founder-focused events but are they actually helpful or just a distraction? Founders need to strike a balance.
Fast-fashion startup Virgio, founded by former Myntra chief Amar Nagaram, is contemplating shutting down its operations less than a year after raising funds at a valuation of over $160 million, acc...
You will only have one shot to impress your future financial backers — make sure you are confident and ready.
While many startups are looking to be the next Twitter, those targeting specific communities may find a better outcome.
The promise of electric aviation has been weighed down by the limited range of batteries and the long certification process. Regent co-founder and CEO Billy Thalheimer, who previously worked at Aur...
OpenAI, one of the best-funded AI startups in business, is exploring making its own AI chips. Discussions of AI chip strategies within the company have been ongoing since at least last year, accord...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. As I sat down to write this week’s Startups Weekly, I do what I do every week: Read every story on TechCrunch. This we...
If you haven’t found traction with customers and aren’t generating revenue, you should be in fundraising mode already.
Y Combinator continues to change shape under CEO Garry Tan, a founder-turned-investor and online influencer. While Tan and his colleagues have attracted media attention lately for quarrelsome socia...
For the 69th installment (nice!) of the Pitch Deck Teardown series, let’s take a peek at how Lupiya told its story to close this round.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our F...
If you haven’t found traction with customers and aren’t generating revenue, you should be in fundraising mode already.
To better understand where startups still stand a chance, and where oligopoly dynamics and first-mover advantages are shaping up, we polled a select group of investors about the future of AI.
PayPal has been hit with a class action lawsuit by consumers represented by law firm Hagens Berman alleging that the fintech giant’s anti-steering rules stifle competition against lower-cost paymen...
Emerge this week announced a partnership with Sony, a big boon for the hardware startup. The deal involves two pieces: first, Sony will highlight Emerge’s ultrasonic tactile device in its smart TV ...
It’s OK for a founder to jump into an emerging hype cycle, but only if they have a genuine interest in that area that reaches back in time.
AI-powered parking platform Metropolis today announced that it raised $1.7 billion to acquire SP Plus, a provider of parking facility management services, in a combination of equity and debt. Eldri...
Section 32, a venture firm founded by ex-Google Ventures CEO Bill Maris, has closed on $525 million in capital commitments across its fifth fund, TechCrunch is first to report. A portion of the ca...
Gradient, a startup that allows developers to build and customize AI apps in the cloud using large language models (LLMs), today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding led by Wing VC with...
Phaver aims to to build a service that provides a web3 onboarding experience that’s similar to existing social platforms.
Venture investors see potential in observability software — i.e. software that gives teams the ability to monitor, measure and understand the state of a system or app. And that’s not su...
The average shopper probably hasn’t heard of SuperOrdinary, but if they are a beauty or skincare fan, they’ve definitely heard of some of the brands the startup works with: Olaplex, Farmacy and Bio...
Liz O’Sullivan is on a mission to make AI “a little bit safer,” in her own words. A member of the National AI Advisory Committee, which drafts recommendations to the White House a...
Are enough people taking the climate threat seriously that a startup focused on wildfire management could succeed? The answer appears to be yes.
Cobre’s corporate treasury platform gives CFOs more visibility and control over their company’s financial transactions and a way to digitize and automate their payment processes.
Bolt.Earth, an Indian startup that offers charging infrastructure and software solutions for electric vehicles, has raised $20 million in a funding round to expand its presence within the South Asi...
ElectraMeccanica, former maker of three-wheeled electric vehicles, said on Wednesday that it has “terminated” its plan to merge with Tevva, which makes hydrogen-electric trucks (not san...
Defense tech darling Mach Industries has closed a $79 million Series A led by Bedrock Capital in a deal that catapulted their post-money valuation to $335 million, multiple sources tell TechCrunch....
When it comes to visiting new cities, Airbnb changed the game for people who might have previously considered only hotels or guest houses: now, flexible alternatives in private homes, powered by a ...
Yes, there are clear concerns about AI’s potential for auto-generating disinformation. But as a tool for creatives to better create, AI is having its moment. And the AI-driven tools designed to ass...
There are many ways startups can build a program to allow their staff to take some early liquidity.
It’s time for Congress to raise the numerical caps and eliminate the country-of-birth caps!
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week we talk with Professor Esther Rodriguez-Villegas from Acurable.
In November 2019, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Angela Strange famously declared that, “Every company will be a fintech company.” Specifically, Strange projected that — in the not-too-d...
Pow.bio intends to bring down the costs associated with biomanufacturing by reimagining of fermentation facility operations.
Today’s news marks a turnaround for a company that’s had its share of ups and downs over the past year.
What if you could interact with any piece of software using natural language? Imagine typing in a prompt and having AI translate the instructions into machine-comprehensible commands, executing tas...
Blackbird Labs, a hospitality tech company whose platform helps restaurants stay in touch with guests and incentivize them to dine out more frequently, today announced that it raised $24 million in...
Flourish Ventures’ Emmalyn Shaw explains how early-stage startups can define, test, pivot and successfully figure out their product-market fit.
CoPilot, a digital training app that matches users with one-on-one remote fitness coaches, has raised $6.5 million in Series A-1 funding led by Jackson Square Ventures. The app, which has seen more...
Opsera, a DevOps platform geared toward enterprise clients, today announced that it raised $12 million in a funding round — a tranche smaller than Opsera’s previous raise — led by...
The move toward open banking payments, especially in the EU, effectively kicked-off the fintech boom. Open banking standards meant that fintech startups could create wallets and effectively become ...
Krafton India has launched a gaming incubator in the South Asian nation as it seeks to expand the local ecosystem and support the domestic talent looking to enter the fast-growing gaming market. Ca...
Investors have historically been skeptical of green hydrogen. High production costs, expensive infrastructure builds, competition with batteries and minimal government support have made the green h...
Sam Altman, Peak XV, and Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman’s AI grant are among backers of an AI startup, founded by two teenagers, that’s aiming to assist businesses in automating numerous...
Greylock 17 will target pre-seed, seed and Series A founders in the areas of enterprise and consumer software.
French startup Qobra has raised a $10.5 million Series A funding round (€10 million) led by Singular with Revenue Syndicate and existing investor Breega also participating. Qobra helps businesses m...
Make customers want what you have to sell. Once you get the formula right, you can worry about capital efficiency.
Automata, a company that combines software and hardware to automate science labs around the globe, has raised $40 million in an equity-based round of funding, as the U.K.-based startup looks to dou...
Sparx is very much in its early stages, however, in the past six months, the company has already reached profitability.
Amar Varma, a three-time entrepreneur and VC, experienced firsthand the challenge of dealing with administering equity stakes within a startup. It’s his belief that many existing solutions &#...
A Kenyan parliamentary committee formed in August to investigate operations and activities of Sam Altman’s crypto project, Worldcoin, in the East African country, has recommended for it to be shut ...
Lex, the app inspired by vintage lesbian personals, just raised $5.6 million in seed funding and elevated co-founder Jennifer Lewis from COO to CEO. As a result, founding CEO Kel Rakowski steps int...
Crypto pretty much seems to have lost its allure as far as venture capitalists are concerned.
Beams’ co-founders Jana Schellong and Mihri Minaz see a fundamental problem with how product teams work. While they have productivity tools that are supposed to help them work smarter, too often th...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend....
Cyrus Khajvandi, a Stanford biology graduate and two-time entrepreneur, often found it challenging to stay on top of scientific research while managing his daily workload. Recognizing that he wasn&...
Greener, the Australian cleantech startup that creates custom action plans to help its customers become more environmentally sustainable, is launching Greener for Business today. Aimed at Australia...
The multi-stage venture capital firm uses a research-driven approach and invests at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds.
Earlier this year, a big French tech company started requiring an email to the CEO for every purchase above €1,000. That’s because they didn’t have the right tool to manage procurement. Meet Pivot,...
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. You know what isn’t a great idea for my energy levels? Enjoying a week of TechCrunch Disrupt and then getting straight...
The company’s toy-focused expansion is its bet that NFTs should have a broader presence, one that’s not limited to the digital world.
Erin Harkless Moore talks about Pivotal Ventures’ investment strategy, and its future.
Meeting investors is easy. The hard part is crafting a story that’s so convincing, they’ll wire you some money.
Just under a year ago, the buzzy new social app BeReal looked to be on the rise, with reportedly 20 million users launching the app every day to snap their candid photos. However, in the months sin...
If you’d like to know what investors are looking for, how they want to be approached and what they’re most likely to ask, keep reading.
I like a good airline points flight just as much as the fuzzy feeling you get from knowing you’ve “beaten the system,” but does Point.me solve a “real” problem?
WestBridge Capital is in advanced stages of talks to purchase shares of Meesho worth tens of millions of dollars in the secondary market, according to two people familiar with the matter, as the hi...
Which do you prefer: Regulators working to contain market power or a potential ceiling being set on exit values for the companies that you back?
I wasn’t able to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt this year. What were your main immigration takeaways for founders and startups?
Pilot, a Vancouver-based startup, wants to become “the hub of global travel experience” and connect people via travel.
The AI-powered news reading app Artifact, built by Instagram’s co-founders, has been transforming itself into a more social experience over time with recent launches like profiles, commenting...
Zapier today announced the launch of Canvas, a new tool that aims to help its users plan and diagram their business-critical processes — with a fair bit of AI sprinkled in there to help them ...
London-based startup Apron announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Index Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners and Visionaries Club participating. The company wa...
Every company is now a software company, as the cliché goes, which means every company needs to understand what’s going on inside their apps and infrastructure. Even the slightest lag can be ...
Transfr, a startup creating VR tools for training and career development, today announced that it raised $40 million in a Series C round led by ABS Capital with participation from JPMorgan Chase Im...
Being, a Delaware-based startup, is on a mission to scale its mental health app, which aims to help users create a map of their concerns to better navigate their everyday issues. The company, which...
Shopping for clothing online has liberated us from the need to brave the endless aisles, fluorescent lights and sale-hungry crowds of the brick-and-mortar retail inferno. But anyone who has found t...
Post, a publisher-focused Twitter/X alternative backed by a16z, is bringing its social news-sharing app to Android today along with new tools that will make it easier for creators to share their ne...
Mercury Fund closed on $160 million in capital commitments for its fifth fund to invest in founders building transformational SaaS and data platforms.
The concept of a data mesh has been around for a few years. At a high level, it’s a data platform architecture that allows users to access data without transferring it to one of two places: a...
The take-up of Kubernetes, a tool for managing containerized workloads, is only expected to increase as demand for cloud-native architectures and containerization continues. In terms of security, t...
Early-stage investors: You’re not in the get-rich-quick game, so act accordingly and set yourself up for long-term success.
As government and banking services move away from verifying identities in the real world, moving toward online ID verification, several companies have entered the market to solve this problem. A ne...
Canvas Ventures’ Mike Ghaffary outlines the important components of defensibility, the key strategic advantage buckets, and how startups can stay competitive.
Many federal agencies that deal with visa and green card processes are still trying to make their way through backlogs from the pandemic.
Slope’s customer pipeline has evolved into mainly enterprise. As a result, both volume and company revenue have increased 17x since last year.
Several factors converged to help Instacart, Arm and Klaviyo to go public, but those trends have largely reversed — we may not see more IPOs for some time.
Typically, a VC fund’s management fee is 2% of AUM, but new data from Carta shows that the 2% figure isn’t as universal as you might think.
Most white collar jobs involve creating presentations. And this can be a time-consuming, laborious process. Presentations include data points, and ensuring that these data points remain accurate an...
French grocery delivery startup La Belle Vie is acquiring Frichti, another food delivery service that was placed under court-ordered receivership. TechCrunch can confirm that the court picked La Be...
Lumu, a startup that helps enterprises identify and isolate security compromises, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round led by Forgepoint Capital, $6 million of which is de...
The new funding will enable the company to expand its automotive credit and insurance products and introduce new features.
Senser describes itself as an AIOps platform that uses machine learning to help developers and ops teams more easily get to the root causes of outages and service degradations. The Tel Aviv-based c...
Resourcify, a waste management and recycling platform, today announced that it raised €14 million ~($14.94 million) in a Series A round led by Vorwerk Ventures with participation from Revent, Anand...
When you think about collaborative design tools, chances are you immediately start thinking about Figma, the popular design tool that Adobe wants to acquire for $20 billion (by the way, that acquis...
Some 76% of the top 500 VC-backed U.K. startups have done nothing to either measure or offset their carbon emissions, according to new research shared exclusively with TechCrunch. In total, these c...
Software is a company’s third-largest expense, but because it’s spread across multiple departments, it’s the CFO’s responsibility to find places to cut.
Network or no, startup founders are increasingly having to figure out sources of financing that’s not venture capital.
Kolena, a startup building tools to test, benchmark and validate the performance of AI models, today announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Lobby Capital with participation ...
Byju’s plans to cut as many as 5,000 jobs in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter said, as the Indian edtech giant looks to pare down costs amid a broader restructuring of its ...
Forget invite-only social apps, Lapse is testing a new technique to acquire its users: It forces you to invite your friends in order to get in. The reinvention of a social camera app first introduc...
This morning is Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day, and there are 22 companies making their debut across a wide range of industries. Whether you’re building a construction business, clean...
Provided that tech stocks don’t drop by a surprise 10%, I suspect that we’re entering a period in which tech companies once again grow their headcounts
As companies grow, they create legal entities and organizational structures to support their lines of business — each with their respective governance and compliance needs. Quickly, keeping t...
Employee surveillance is on the rise. According to one poll, searches for staff-monitoring software rose by 75% in March 2020 compared with the 2019 monthly average — and demand remained stro...
The company, which has helped thousands of users in the U.S. Latino community with financial products advice, adds legal tech and services.
If a company wants to offer in-app messaging or voice calls, they don’t have to develop the infrastructure themselves when there’s something like Twilio at their disposal. Likewise, if ...
Kneron, which is developing AI chips to power self-driving cars, among other autonomous machines, today announced that it raised $49 million in an extension to its Series B round from investors inc...
GIC is in talks to invest in the Indian startup Vegrow, which runs a business-to-business marketplace for fruits, two sources familiar with the matter said. The Singapore sovereign fund is evaluati...
Klaviyo’s and Instacart’s shares went on to trade above their initial IPO pricing after Arm’s own listing. However, the momentum hasn’t lasted long.
Nx, a startup developing tooling to make it simpler for software dev teams to work within a single code repository, today closed a $16 million Series A round with participation from Nexus Venture P...
There exist a myriad of answers to the question, “How do you found your first startup?” But which of those answers apply to you and your situation?
Funding for startups in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) fell precipitously early this year. From January to March, PNW financing dipped 80% to $246 million, down from $1.2 billion during the same perio...
The whiplash we’ve seen in the labor market over the last few years has created an environment that startups can and should take advantage of.
TeachMe.To, a sports coaching platform for beginner athletes, secured $2 million in seed funding, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The funding will be used to scale the platform, launch a n...
For researchers, reading scientific papers can be immensely time-consuming. According to one survey, scientists spend seven hours each week searching for information. Another survey suggests that s...
Amazon has agreed to invest up to $4 billion in the AI startup Anthropic, the two firms said, as the e-commerce group steps up its rivalry against Microsoft, Meta, Google and Nvidia in the fast-gro...
The generative AI boom has put a spring in the step of Correcto, a Madrid-based language writing tool startup focused on Spanish speakers that’s today announcing $7 million in seed funding. T...
Building an equitable cap table allows startups to bring on experts they wouldn’t be able to hire while making VC more diverse.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. If you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
“Accessibility is a human right,” reads a sticker from the Howe Innovation Center. And for sure, it is great to see startups help companies make this a reality.
This week, the TechCrunch team descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center to celebrate one of the biggest to-dos in the startup world: TechCrunch Disrupt.
$20 million doesn’t lie, so let’s see where Transcend, er, transcends and where it remains painfully mortal.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 ended yesterday, and out of all the events I’ve attended since working here, this one was my favorite.
FinanceGPT is a generative AI startup built to help companies in their financial analysis tasks. Initially built for startups without in-house finance teams, and VCs looking to run financial health...
People with diabetes have to monitor their blood sugar levels regularly by pricking their skin. Many glucose-monitoring device makers worldwide are pursuing needle-free approaches to make this pain...
Olivia Deramus’ company Communia competes in TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200, with the mission to create a safe digital space for women.
Kinhub, a B2B SaaS platform powered by AI, seeks to democratize access to coaching and wellness support for employees.
eStreamly offers business-to-business video commerce software to enable livestreams and videos to be shoppable across platforms.
AvantGuard, a Battlefield 200 company, is making a polymer version of chlorine-based disinfectants.
Bundl provides a total rewards software that enables employees to build and customize their own rewards package that best fits their wants and needs.
Most electronic waste isn’t recycled; instead, our dumped devices (and the toxic metals within) pile up in landfills, polluting the air and contaminating nearby soil and groundwater. Ghana-ba...
Can software work alongside human physicists and engineers in R&D labs to develop new quantum computers? That’s the question Qruise, a startup in TechCrunch’s Battlefield 200 compet...
News aggregation startup Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom doesn’t believe in AI doomerism, even as he’s developing a new app that’s embracing novel AI technologies. The Instagram...
Secoda, a startup developing what it describes as an AI-powered data search and cataloging platform, today announced that it raised $14 million in a funding round led by Craft Ventures with partici...
Investors want to see accelerating growth, and that is much harder to read on a cumulative graph.
Astronauts have been conducting experiments on the International Space Station for as long as the station has been in orbit, but astronaut labor is expensive: crew time costs $130,000 per hour, and...
In the early days of your startup, it’s important to be as efficient as possible, not only with this $10K budget, but also with your time.
Mesh (formerly Front Finance), a startup developing a service to help customers transfer and manage digital assets like crypto, has raised $22 million in a Series A funding round led by Money Forwa...
Several years ago, Aleksander Caban, the co-founder of Carbon Studio, a Polish VR game developer, observed a major problem in modern game design. He had to create rocks, hills, paths and other basi...
The UN estimates that about one-third of all food produced goes to waste before it even gets the chance to decompose in your fridge. That abysmal stat explains one key reason why leading VCs and ce...
Lab-grown meat is buzzy for a reason. The ick factor is palpable, and the benefits of scaling alternatives to factory farming are enormous. Yet, plenty of other crucial corners of agriculture often...
Y Combinator has been on the defensive as of late. This past weekend, leaders from the popular accelerator were vocal on X (formerly known as Twitter) in their reaction to a comment made by the CEO...
Alpha3D, a generative AI–powered platform, is a participant of the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort to showcase a technology that can hyperscale digital assets.
While studying computer science at the University of Chicago, Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove were inspired to build tech that centered on the needs of communities historically marginalized b...
Clika, a startup participating in the Battlefield 200 competition at TC Disrupt 2023, aims to build tech to “compress” existing AI models.
Standard pet ID tools, like tags and chips, are imperfect. Tags become easily detached, and not every owner is comfortable with the idea of microchipping their pet. Even those who are comfortable o...
The White House is launching a training program that promises to prepare 20,000 people for a range of jobs across climate tech and ecosystem restoration.
Capsule, a startup that’s been putting AI to use in video editing, is releasing its product to the public, after three years in development. The company’s enterprise-focused AI editor a...
In a world of ever-advancing technologies, it can be tempting to embed your pitch deck with all the latest bells and whistles. But do they even work?
Two years after announcing voice chat was coming to Roblox, the gaming company has acquired a voice tech startup, Speechly, offering voice chat moderation, real-time transcription and Voice API tha...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups. We were live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023!
A few weeks ago, it was reported that MotherDuck, the company commercializing the lightweight database platform DuckDB, was in talks to raise new capital from VC firm Felicis. Those talks went well...
Airbnb is trying to crack down on fake listings by verifying all listings in its top five markets — the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K. and France. The company is trying to crack down on fake lis...
Here’s another edition of “Ask Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
Legit Security, a cybersecurity company developing a platform to identify app vulnerabilities from code, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by CRV with participation from Cybers...
Google-backed audio content platform Kuku FM has raised $25 million in a new funding round as it looks to make deeper inroads with its audiobook offerings in the South Asian market. Indian billiona...
Africa’s agricultural sector has a significant social and economic impact, per McKinsey. The percentage of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa exceeds 60%, while agriculture accounts for appr...
FlexPay Technologies is a Kenyan fintech out to enable consumers to afford products that would have otherwise been out of reach for them.
In a wide-ranging conversation at this year’s Disrupt, founder Zach Perret talked candidly about the highs and lows of Plaid’s journey.
Utsav Somani, who helped AngelList launch in India and oversaw its local operations for five years, is gearing up to find more ways to help founders. On Wednesday, the entrepreneur said he had rais...
Shaquille O’Neal, 15-time NBA All-Star, four-time NBA champion and three-time NBA Finals MVP, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about his passion for investing in edtech and backing proj...
For startups dying of thirst in this desert devoid of capital, Instacart could not have offered up a more satisfying glass of cool water.
In its ongoing effort to make its AI systems more robust, OpenAI today launched the OpenAI Red Teaming Network, a contracted group of experts to help inform the company’s AI model risk assess...
Fairly AI, participating in the Startup Battlefield 200 competition, is tackling challenges around AI risk, compliance and governance.
I’m thrilled to announce the Startup Battlefield 20 companies, pitching at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. After last year’s big hit, TechCrunch editorial hand-selected 200 startups, out of th...
Just in case you’re wondering what’s happening in the sectors that we’re going to talk about at Disrupt, we’ve put together a handy primer of surveys.
What will it take to spur more mainstream gamers to pick up and play web3 games? We asked eight web3 gaming experts to find out.
ZayZoon, a fintech firm that got its start charging employees $5 to get paid sooner, has raised $34.5 million in a Series B round co-led by Framework and EDC with participation from ATB Financial. ...
Deep tech companies, especially in the early stages in difficult funding environments, should focus first and foremost on closing the deal.
Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 — day one! We’re thrilled that you’re here, and we’re rarin’ to dive into three full days laser focused on the tools, information and connections that fuel early-...
Cato Networks, the Tel Aviv-based startup that packages software-defined networking, managed cybersecurity and global backbone services into a single offering, today announced that it raised $238 m...
While working at GitLab, Job van der Voort hired remote workers in about 70 countries. The process was such a challenge that with co-founder Marcelo Lebre, he decided to found Remote in 2019. The p...
HiddenLayer, a security startup focused on protecting AI systems from adversarial attacks, today announced that it raised $50 million in a funding round co-led by M12 and Moore Strategic Ventures w...
As organizations shift their operations to the cloud, they’re experiencing more security incidents — the result of challenges around the transitions from on-premises to remote data and ...
Two years ago, after Vlad Shipilov, a Russian immigrant, moved to Portugal, his business visa was denied because his lawyer wasn’t aware of certain requirements pertaining to visa application...
Babbel, the popular subscription-based language learning service, today announced that it has acquired Toucan, the well-funded language learning browser extension. Toucan, it turns out, wound down ...
The most recent cohort from Y Combinator features more than 200 startups. More than a record half of the S23 startups focus on AI applications, highlighting a dominant trend we can expect in the co...
Plan A, a carbon accounting and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting platform for corporations, has raised $27 million in a Series A round of funding led by U.S. VC giant Lightspee...
European Union (EU) lawmakers this month announced plans to reduce waste and increase recycling across the bloc, with proposals to collect and process 45% of 16 identified “strategic” r...
French startup Stoïk offers a cyber insurance product to small and medium companies — a bit like Coalition in the U.S. And things have been working well in France. So the company just announce...
Companies often attempt to raise from VCs despite knowing they can’t possibly deliver venture-scale returns.
Investors haven’t tired of generative AI startups yet — particularly those with clear enterprise applications. Case in point, Writer, which is developing what it describes as a “f...
After combing through thousands of startups from around the world, TechCrunch is thrilled to announce the 2023 Startup Battlefield 200 — our invitation-only cohort of game-changing early-stage star...
If investor sentiment does turn out to be that good, these IPOs could prove a boon for late-stage startups everywhere.
Bird Buddy, the startup behind multiple AI-powered smart bird feeders, including the recently announced smart Hummingbird Feeder and Bird Bath, is today launching its latest product — and it&...
An X challenger didn’t hide its ambitions to take on the social network formerly known as Twitter when it dubbed itself T2 at launch, but now that name — one which indicates a desire to...
Medication might be easier than exercise or eating right, however TrueMed wants to change your thinking on that.
Buckle up and get ready to take your business to the next level. TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 begins tomorrow — take a peek at what to expect!
Back in 2014, Stan Garber and Alex Yakubovich set out to reinvent the request for proposals (RFP) process with the launch of Scout RFP, which provides a cloud-based sourcing solution designed to he...
Dragos, a company building software to secure the control systems for manufacturing and industrial equipment, has raised $74 million in a Series D round extension led by WestCap. The round, which b...
Kenya-based EV startup Roam has unveiled a new shuttle bus model dubbed Move, coming as the East African country continues to push for the adoption of electric vehicles. Roam (formerly Opibus) now ...
The future of mopeds and motorcycles is electric, Erik Buell says. He sees mopeds and motorcycles playing a greater role in transportation.
Once valued at over $2 billion, rent-to-own startup Divvy Homes conducted its third round of layoffs in a year’s time.
French battery maker Verkor secured more than €2 billion (around $2.1 billion) to build its Dunkirk gigafactory, which is set to be operational by 2025.
Bold creates personalized exercise programs for seniors to reduce injury. It’s one of the latest companies expanding the eldertech sector.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. I know it’s perhaps unfair to assume that angels have the same approach to investors as professional, institutional pr...
Raghav Poddar was studying computer science at Columbia University when he became intrigued by the challenges restaurant owners were facing maintaining an online presence. A self-described “f...
It’s shaping up to be a very busy week, so we’ll be back on Friday, September 22 with a new TC+ Roundup.
There’s a lot to love about this cute, animated pitch deck, except one thing.
A year ago, the average successful slide deck contained 19 slides. Today, the average slide deck contains 16 topics. So, should founders still be striving to shorten their decks even more?
Welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, when we talk about the week’s biggest news.
Heed this final call! It’s time for all you last-minute decision makers, fence-sitters and procrastinators to shake a leg, because today is the last day that you can grab a discount on a pass to Te...
Before diving into the options for managing your funds, let’s first determine what actually counts as “liquid cash” to run your business.
Koo, India’s alternative to Twitter, is looking to find a strategic partner with a “distribution strength” as it enters its “next phase,” according to its co-founder, ...
Over the years, social media has moved further and further away from its original value proposition of being a network where you could keep up with close friends and family in a private space. Inst...
Proteins, the natural molecules that carry out key cellular functions within the body, are the building blocks of all diseases. Characterizing proteins can reveal the mechanisms of a disease, inclu...
Your B2B leads will go to waste unless you begin to create lapsed buckets and develop a strategy to attack them head-on.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is mere days away, people! We can’t wait to welcome you and watch the inspiration, collaboration and opportunities unfold. This epic event could not happen without the stead...
How can Asian businesses send and receive payments cheaper, faster and more securely? Circle thinks the answer may come from blockchain and stablecoins.
Time, as they say, is money. Well the money clock is ticking, and time is running out if you hope to shave some cheddar off the price of a pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Beat the clock: Buy your ...
When Silicon Valley Bank imploded in March, Sam Heshmati wasn’t naive enough to think that First Republic Bank — where he had worked for more than a decade and helped launch their startup pra...
LastMile AI, a platform designed to help software engineers develop and integrate generative AI models into their apps, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by Gradient, Google’s AI-f...
We asked Latin American investors where they are placing their bets, when they think Brazil’s IPO window might reopen, how to best pitch them, and more.
Helsing, a “Defense AI” startup backed by Spotify founder Daniel Ek which had previously raised €102.5 million, has today pulled in another €209 million ($223 million) in a Series B fun...
Pixis, an AI-powered platform for brands to monitor and orchestrate their marketing campaigns, today announced that it raised $85 million in a Series C1 round led by Touring Capital with participat...
It turns out that when you put together two AI experts, both of whom formerly worked at Meta researching responsible AI, magic happens. The founders of Patronus AI came together last March to build...
Data analytics and AI software maker Databricks has raised a Series I round worth more than $500 million, earning a valuation of $43 billion. This round sticks out, particularly as many late-stage ...
Mecho Autotech, a startup offering automotive spare parts, vehicle repairs and maintenance services, has raised a $2.4 million pre-Series A round. The firm targets the Nigerian market, where 90% of...
From Tableau and Looker, to PowerBI and beyond, there is no shortage of business intelligence (BI) tools designed to help companies unlock insights from their vast swathes of data. But a newcomer h...
Here’s another edition of “Ask Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
We’re less than one week away from TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! The epic global startup conference takes flight on September 19 and runs through September 21 in San Francisco. We have one final group o...
Binalyze, a London-based startup building a toolset for digital forensics and incident response, this week announced that it raised $19 million in a Series A round led by Molten Ventures with parti...
Europe-based The Exploration Company is gearing up to compete with in-space delivery providers SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, with the startup announcing this week that it had signed a preliminary ca...
Public cloud services spending is projected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2026, up from $531.7 billion this year, according to IDC. But as the use of cloud services expands, organizations are having a ...
A clever new app called Slingshot is combining the serendipity of BeReal snaps with the friends-only photo sharing popularized by apps like Snapchat. But while the app’s inspirations are fami...
The company is building an AI-enabled data platform for companies that want to know more about the carbon credits they buy.
Jess Murrey isn’t your typical founder. After 10 years working in nonprofits to train young activists, Murrey and behavioral change researcher Alicia Clifton decided that mobile gaming could be an ...
Artifact, the personalized news aggregator built by Instagram’s co-founders, is launching a new feature today that takes the app in a different direction beyond tracking, summarizing and comm...
Now, hear this! You have only 72 hours left to fight inflation on prices to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. The startup world’s big tent kicks off next week and runs September 19–21. Tick tock: Buy ...
The earth has seen a 69% decline in wildlife populations over the last 50 years. In the same amount of time, carbon emissions have increased by 90%. And while many venture firms have been created t...
Arturo Villanueva spent over four years on Stripe’s financial partnerships team. During that time, he led partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and regional banks across Latin Ameri...
Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. We brought TechCrunch+ senior climate reporter Tim De Chant on to talk climate tech and the sustainability stage at Disrupt.
For the past few years, everybody working in fintech has been talking about embedded finance. It’s supposed to be the next revolution in financial services — bringing financial services to other pr...
Port’s founders decided to build a developer portal, a central place for developers to find all the information about their development projects, at a good time. Companies have been recognizing the...
A year ago, Stability AI, the London-based startup behind the open source image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion, quietly released Dance Diffusion, a model that can generate songs and sound eff...
Kolors, a Mexico City-based startup that connects intercity bus riders with bus drivers, is acquiring B2B van pooling provider Urbvan for $12 million cash, the company shared Wednesday. Kolors CEO ...
While many quick grocery delivery startups have struggled, others are still seeing growth. Why? They are focused on emerging markets.
It’s an ambitious and necessary goal. We’re talking about Apple’s commitment to be 100% carbon neutral by 2030. How do you make a nearly $3 trillion company green? We’re going to hear a lot about t...
Despite the surge of interest in AI, startups hoping to use it as a springboard to their next funding round should think twice.
Can you believe it? TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is just one week away! We can’t wait to greet you, and we’ve put together this very handy how-to guide with just about everything you need to help you ge...
This episode dives into building a company later in life, the clean beauty movement and when to know to split a startup into two entities.
As the IPO market slowly comes back to life, it’s becoming easier to understand just how far off the mark some startup valuations were back in 2021.
So many companies are using low-code and no-code tools these days to create apps and workflows. These tools are by design likely in the hands of non-technical end users, but the problem is that the...
If AI is essential to your solution, you should be prepared to explain the measurable impact it has on your product offering.
The final-sale countdown continues, and we’re here to remind you that the price on every pass to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 suffers a growth spurt in just four days. Why pay full freight when all it t...
Enfabrica, a company building networking chips designed to handle AI and machine learning workloads, today announced that it raised $125 million in a Series B funding round that values the company ...
Sending money across borders is filled with friction, like long wait times, high transaction costs and markups on currency exchange. A startup called Parallax wants to make the process faster and c...
CertifID, a startup developing fraud prevention tech for the real estate market, today announced that it raised $20 million in a funding round led by Arthur Ventures at “over double” it...
AuthMind, a Maryland-based startup that aims to help businesses protect themselves from identity-related cyberattacks, today announced that it has raised an $8.5 million seed round led by Ballistic...
Mighty Buildings, a startup building tech for prefabricated, ostensibly environmentally-friendly homes, today announced that it raised $52 million in a funding round co-led by Waed Ventures and Bol...
ELSA, the English language learning platform, announced today it has raised $23 million in Series C funding. It also launched ELSA AI Tutor, which draws on years of speech recognition data collecte...
Like in many industries, there’s an acute shortage of security guards. This means guards still on the job have to pull extra hours and are more likely to make mistakes because of fatigue. Ascento i...
FunNow, the Taiwan-based app that lets users book activities on-demand in five Asian countries, is growing its reach in Southeast Asia through a merger with restaurant booking app Eatigo. Terms of ...
Venture funding for battery recycling startups is popping off lately, and the latest to see the IRA-driven upside is Ascend Elements, which announced a massive $542 million in Series D funding on t...
Holy smokes, only one week to go before TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes over San Francisco! We can’t wait to see you there! If you haven’t already done so, buy your pass before Friday, Septembe...
Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable res...
Kale Logistics Solutions, an Indian startup offering a vertical SaaS platform to assist logistics needs, has raised $30 million in a fresh funding round, as the 14-year-old startup eyes expansion i...
KKR is doubling down on its bet in Reliance Retail, valuing India’s largest retail chain at $100 billion in a fresh $250 million investment. The deal follows the Qatar Investment Authority investin...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week.
There’s a gold rush on in biotech as AI and other tools are used to find new drugs and treatments. With $5.5 million in new funding, Scala Biodesign is focusing these methods on a related pro...
We’ve turned the corner, and we’re thundering down the homestretch to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19–21. Maybe you bought your pass months ago — congratulations, you’re the equi...
Common Trust works with business owners to design, finance and execute an employee ownership buyout so that owners or investors can access liquidity by exiting to employees.
Satellites have come into focus as a critical way — and sometimes the only way — to deliver communications and receive data about certain locations around the world, a power position th...
India will reconsider allowing local firms to list on foreign exchanges, including the London Stock Exchange, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said Monday, in a move that could allow startups in...
Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and non-banking financial institutions, has raised $229 million in a new funding round as it looks to deepe...
Parker Conrad may be best known as the founder of both Zenefits and Rippling, but he is also arguably the best-known founder to have gone through Y Combinator’s accelerator program twice. Of ...
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. if you want to receive The Interchange directly in your inbox every Sunday, head here to sign...
Some fintech companies are weathering the storm better than others and seeing an end in sight.
It’s not surprising Victory Park Capital can’t find a buyer for its stake in Perch; this market is tough for Amazon aggregator startups.
Set your coordinates for the Space Stage on September 19, Day 1 promptly at 0800 hours of TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. You’ll find sessions featuring some of the industry’s leading founders, investors,...
When Flexport founder Ryan Petersen picked Amazon consumer chief Dave Clark to lead the buzzy freight forwarding and logistics startup, he noted that they needed an “entrepreneur” and a...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. All right, all right, all right. Over the past few days, I’ve been listening to Matthew McConaughey’s memoir Greenligh...
With less than two weeks to go until TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 kicks off in San Francisco, we’re here with a reminder that networking is job fun at Disrupt! Yes, networking is serious business, and w...
Decks for education-based startups are pretty rare. Here’s how Tomorrow University landed that $10 million.
Most startups never get past the pitch deck stage, so getting an investor to say yes can become a founder’s all-encompassing desire.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is so close we can practically hear the hustle and bustle of 10,000 startup movers, shakers and future unicorns converging on San Francisco’s Moscone West. It all goes...
After the collapse of FTX, crypto traders have been looking for decentralized, non-custodial and safer ways to execute orders and store their assets. This explains why some decentralized crypto exc...
While a medical student at UC San Francisco, Dereck Paul grew concerned that innovation in medical software was lagging behind other sectors, like finance and aerospace. He came to believe that pat...
Founders of Rario, the cricket NFT startup in which India’s Dream11 led a $120 million funding round last year, are leaving the two-year-old firm, people familiar with the matter said. Ankit ...
The word on everybody’s lips was “AI,” but there was a number of startups trying to make trucking, and the larger logistics world, work better and faster.
Pricing too high at early stage is rife with issues that can plague the company’s growth if it doesn’t operate to perfection.
Ello aims to eradicate childhood illiteracy by leveraging artificial intelligence and child speech recognition technology. The startup announced today that it secured $15 million in Series A financ...
Nextdoor has become ground zero for the spread of many rumors, hoaxes and unfounded allegations.
Here’s how some AI-forward tech companies on the public markets are forecasting growth.
Imbue, the AI research lab formerly known as Generally Intelligent, has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round that values the company at over $1 billion. Among those participating are the...
Privacy regulation and a growing awareness among consumers and businesses of what “data protection” could and should mean have created a tricky landscape in the tech world. Data really ...
There’s a new self-driving trucks startup in town. And the faces are familiar. Bryan Salesky, Peter Rander and Brett Browning — the trio behind the now defunct Ford and VW-backed autonomous v...
Retool started out as a platform for building line-of-business apps, but over the last few years, the well-funded startup added a number of back-end services as well, including, most recently, a wo...
With Syscap, customers can register their private lines of credit and perform communication, monitoring and reporting functions all in one place.
Certa, a compliance, governance and risk management platform for enterprises, today announced that it raised $35 million in a Series B round co-led by Fin Capital and Vertex Ventures, with particip...
Fighting for relevance in the growing — and ultra-competitive — AI space, IBM this week introduced new generative AI models and capabilities across its recently launched Watsonx data sc...
The United Kingdom (U.K.) is set to rejoin the European Union’s (EU) preeminent science R&D funding program, after a prolonged hiatus resulting from Brexit. The joint statement, issued by...
OpenAI will host a developer conference — its first ever — on November 6, the company announced today. At the one-day OpenAI DevDay event, which will feature a keynote address and break...
You’re just a couple weeks away from meeting the Startup Battlefield 200 companies in person at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! We’re incredibly proud of — and impressed by — this year’s hand-picked cohor...
What follows are our favorites from the first day’s pitches, listed in no particular order.
If tech could claim just one theme this year, it would, hands down, be AI. It’s absolutely everywhere, especially, one could argue, in the cloud. And if you’re going to talk about AI in the cloud, ...
Big names like Starbucks and Nike were quick to adopt blockchain tech, but it will still be a while until we see the enterprise space embrace the tech.
It’s that time of year again: the week when startups in Y Combinator’s latest batch present their products for media — and investor — scrutiny. Over the next two days, rough...
Social media often disconnects people from the real world, keeping people inside scrolling feeds on their phones. New social app Voiijer wants to do the opposite by connecting nature enthusiasts to...
We’ve got one last addition to Thursday’s Hardware Stage, and it’s a good one. Robin Liu, OnePlus’ North American CEO, will round out the lineup. After a stint at Chinese TV manufacturer Skyworth, ...
TechCrunch+ heard from 15 VCs about why or why not they are tuning in to YC’s Demo Day festivities this week.
Tech companies are getting the hang of making money, or at least they’re losing far less than they used to when money was cheap and “growth” was sexy.
500 Global, the venture firm and seed accelerator, has closed $143 million in financing for what it claims is its largest Southeast Asia early-stage fund to date. The new tranche, 500 Southeast Asi...
Bandana’s co-founder and CEO Timothy Makalinao grew up in a working class household and saw firsthand how hard it can be for hourly wage employees to find decent work and support a family. When he ...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
The funding enables SkinnyDipped to work on its retail expansion plans into new retailers like Costco and Publix and continue innovating into new spaces over the coming months.
“We chose ‘Pynt’ because it’s short, memorable and reflects our love for developers and a good beer,” Pynt co-founder and CEO Tzvika Shneider told me when I asked him ...
Lucas Ochoa and Gautam Bose were hired together out of college at Google Creative Lab, Google’s tech and culture incubator, and spent three and a half years launching products like the AI Tes...
It’s easy to start a startup. But it’s far more difficult to shut one down. An estimated 90% of all startups fail, so there is no question that the problem is a widespread one. Yet the process to w...
Kenji Niwa, an immigrant entrepreneur, experienced the challenges of getting financial products, including a credit card, without a credit history when he moved to the U.S. in 2017 to get his MBA a...
In early 2022, ex-Andela and Flutterwave co-founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, in an interview with TechCrunch, discussed a moonshot project he was working on: Talent City, explicitly designed for local an...
Two senior executives at Oyo have left the budget-hospitality startup, mere months before the company plans to list. Ankit Gupta, who joined the unicorn startup in 2019 and served as its India chie...
Josys, a startup offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to automate corporate IT software application management, has raised a $93 million Series B round led by existing backer Global Bra...
This one goes out to all the nonprofit organizations. We see you, and we get it. Whether you’re building tech or buying it, a nonprofit budget stretches only so far. That’s why nonprofits (along wi...
‘Extraordinary ability or achievement’ may sound lofty, but you don’t have to have a Nobel Prize to qualify for this visa!
Wayflyer, which provides financing to e-commerce startups in exchange for a portion of their future revenue, today announced that it secured $1 billion in capital from investment management firm Ne...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Graham Hine, the co-founder and CEO of ePlant, a startup that creates sensors that monit...
It takes a small army to produce a world-class tech conference, and we’re searching for a battalion of smart, eager volunteers to lend a hand at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Fr...
Founders want to know what new technology can do, but an investor is much more likely to ask about which specific problems it solves.
When a company’s known for pioneering the modern approach to SaaS marketing and monetization, how does it foster innovation to push boundaries and stay ahead of the pack? We’re excited to address t...
Neurodivergent individuals often have a harder time finding jobs than their non-neurodivergent counterparts. Unemployment for neurodivergent adults runs at least as high as 30% to 40% — three times...
To stay competitive in the crowded market for videoconferencing, Zoom is updating and rebranding several of its AI-powered features, including the generative AI assistant formerly known as Zoom IQ....
Point.me, an online search engine and concierge service that makes it easy to discover real-time reward flight options, has raised $10 million in Series A funding led by by Thayer Ventures. The pla...
Sometimes the work of having a job takes time away from work. Tasks like asking for leave, filing tech requests and checking company policy also result in a lot of administrative work for HR and IT...
Meet Worldover, a new London-based startup that recently received $3.8 million in funding (£3 million). The startup is trying to simplify the compliance process when it comes to launching new produ...
Of the many lofty promises of cryptocurrency, one of the most commendable ones is its potential to bring financial inclusion to underserved users. Nairobi-based Kotani Pay is a crypto payments star...
Money sent home by migrant workers not only helps their families, but also enables entire economies to develop. But transferring money comes at a high cost to workers, with remittance fees averagin...
TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship startup event, returns to San Francisco on September 19–21, and you can bet TechCrunch+ will be in the house. With excitement and pride, here’s what we have i...
Hero MotoCorp, the world’s top two-wheeler maker, and Singapore sovereign fund GIC are investing $108 million in Ather Energy, a promising electric vehicle startup in India whose fast-growing...
Taste is something that continues to be a challenge for plant-based protein companies. If it tastes more like meat, it’s a winner, according to new stats from Good Food Institute.
Butternut Box, a U.K.-based startup that prepares and ships healthy food and supplements for dogs, is raising £280 million ($354 million) in a round of funding from General Atlantic and L Catterton...
Founders chatted with us about construction tech trends so we could get a basic idea of where the industry is headed.
Bladder health isn’t the sexiest subject in the world, so it probably won’t surprise you there are so few startups focused on the area. Only one, actually, according to Jude founder Peo...
Just a couple more weeks until 20 of the world’s top early-stage startups take to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 to compete for an equity-free, $100,000 grand prize and eternal glory....
At this point, it seems the only thing that could shake up the seemingly never-ending decline in venture interest in crypto would be a drastic thawing of the crypto winter.
While VCs may have dodged a bullet regarding what fund disclosure rules the SEC did pass, they shouldn’t overlook them.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. As we head into a long holiday weekend here in the U.S., we look at — among other things — a ...
Managing returns efficiently is a necessity for online sellers; to keep their customers happy to retain them, but also because reducing their environmental impact becomes no longer optional.
Economic headwinds have scattered many of the gains that fintech companies made during the tech funding boom of 2021. Case in point — global payment platforms Stripe and Checkout.com lowered their ...
Would you eat lab-grown meat? Would you give the same answer if someone asked you to use a beauty product that had lab-grown collagen as an ingredient? Cellular agriculture — the process of growing...
Walmart has spent $3.5 billion this year to acquire shares from certain Flipkart stakeholders and resolve liabilities with some PhonePe shareholders, illustrating just how aggressively it’s b...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. It’s sometimes hard to remember that, as a startup founder, you have influence over aspects of your business that you ...
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 kicks off in just two weeks, and we can’t wait to meet you there! This is the startup world’s main event, and it’s where you’ll find the knowledge, tools and connections you...
When a group of startups works on a similar set of problems, they frequently bring about massive shifts in how day-to-day life is lived.
August is one of the slowest months in venture capital, which is why now is such a good time for fundraising founders to ramp up their outreach.
Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, has raised over $15 billion, employs more than 3,000 people and expanded its footprint across multiple cities within the U.S. It even has a pr...
The move comes after the New York-based company raised $380 million in equity and debt in the past two years.
About a year ago, I tore down a pitch deck by Mi Terro, founded by Robert Luo. Guess who’s back with another company? Luo has raised $1.5 million for Tanbii from a Hong Kong family office. In...
EV startup Fisker revealed more details about its $29,900 Pear electric urban lifestyle crossover vehicle Thursday at the company’s Product Vision Day. Included in that reveal was confirmatio...
New e-bike models keep coming off production lines with GPS tracking enabled, with the idea that such tech will deter theft and help you recover your bike if it gets stolen. But how exactly does kn...
You may be more familiar with his father, Steve Jobs, but Reed Jobs aims to make his own impact on the world by making cancer nonlethal. Jobs, who lost his father to pancreatic cancer while a stude...
Are startups facing an insurmountable hurdle when it comes to leveraging LLMs and related technologies as effectively as their larger rivals?
It’s long been argued that relying on credit scores for things such as evaluating rental applications is an old-fashioned model that needs to be done away with. But the question of how to determine...
About the time that Floworks co-founders Sudipta Biswas and Sarthak Shrivastava were starting at Y Combinator in the Winter 23 cohort, they had a chat with veteran investor Vinod Khosla, who encour...
In the past year, the company grew its customer base by 600%, adding over 1,000 new veterinary clinics and hospitals.
Speak, an English language learning platform backed by OpenAI’s startup investment fund, the OpenAI Startup Fund, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series B-2 funding round led ...
The Martian Lawyers Club (MLC) wants to take game personalization to the next level with the help of generative AI. While there are plenty of companies that focus on using AI to generate game asset...
Storied venture firm Y Combinator has removed an Indian startup from its batch after discovering “irregularities” at the firm, several people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. M...
French startup Teale has secured a funding round of $11 million earlier this summer (€10 million). The company provides a mental health platform for employees and helps HR managers when it comes to...
AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup developing a range of text-generating AI tools, has raised $155 million in a Series C funding round led by Walden Catalyst, Pitango, SCB10X, b2venture, Samsung N...
Back in 2018, the Cato Institute estimated it would take 151 years for a person born in India to get a green card in the EB-2 category.
Software as a service (SaaS) is an ever-evolving industry, especially now with AI changing the software landscape yet again. It’s why we dedicated a day and a stage to the topic at TechCrunch Disru...
Betaworks is no stranger to investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, but the latest cohort of their Camp “thematic accelerator” indicates a confidence in the field bey...
Entrepreneur Steve Blank says we’re collectively underestimating the potential of generative AI.
Dunzo informed its employees on Wednesday that it would not be able to meet the postponed deadline for their monthly wages as trouble mounts at the hyperlocal delivery startup that expended over $1...
This is our Wednesday show, in which we sit down with a guest (Anu Hariharan), talk about their work and unpack the rest.
Since the release of ChatGPT at the end of last year, we’ve seen companies developing generative AI tooling to help customers interact with their products and services in a more natural way. Yet in...
It’s hardware’s time to shine at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! Granted, deciding what to include from such a rich category was a challenge. We persevered, and we’re thrilled to announce that the Hardwar...
A lot of the most popular construction software was developed 20 to 40 years ago and many systems don’t talk to each other. As a result, the information stored in them is fragmented, adding extra w...
Biotech, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies all hope AI will streamline drug development and make it more efficient, and 38% have already adopted the technology, according to Deloitte. Quan...
The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 340 million workplace incidents every year. Voxel was created to increase workplace safety through computer vision. The startup announ...
The company connects large foodservice manufacturers with small retailers — like bars, restaurants, cafés and bakeries — a marketplace and manages fulfillment, logistics and even credit.
Hyperproof, a software-as-a-service risk and compliance management company, today announced that it raised $40 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital with participation from Toba Capit...
AI — the tech that’s everywhere and touching everything — keeps evolving at a pace that’s surprising even in an industry where change is just about the only constant. It’s complicated, unregu...
Considering the ongoing debate about the existential dangers of AI, it was interesting to watch a three-hour historical epic about the dawn of the Atomic Age last night.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Ida Josefiina, the co-founder and CEO of Sane, a social knowledge sharing platform.
A few years ago, it was hard to imagine that finance would become one of the most innovative industries in tech. And yet, the world of fintech is an ever-evolving one with entrepreneurs trying to m...
AI is nothing new in the recycling industry, but Refiberd’s approach appears to break fresh ground both in its application to textile recycling and hyperspectral imagery.
Deskless workers make up about 70% to 80% of the global workforce. Because they spend most of their time away from a computer, many deskless workers often find it challenging to keep in touch with ...
If the 2020s are going to be the decade of AI, then the 2030s could be the decade of fusion power. That is, if the sector’s startups are able to deliver.
Whether you’re building a chip or an airplane, you need to measure the effectiveness of the product at each step of the manufacturing process, much like you do with developing software. Flojoy, an ...
Hi all! Connie Loizos here with a brief bulletin: I’m the new General Manager and Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch. [Puffs on cigar.] I know, you’re busy – I get it – so I want to take jus...
Lighter Capital designed its revenue-based financing model for SaaS, technology services, subscription services and digital media companies that already have revenue and are growing.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is set to kick off three jam-packed days on September 19–12 in San Francisco. This is the startup world’s Super Bowl, and you do not want to sit on the sidelines. Get in the...
Rockset, a company building tools to drive real-time search and data analytics, today announced that it raised $44 million — $37 million in equity and $7 million in debt — led by ICON V...
Amazon has acquired Fig, a Y Combinator (YC) alum that has been setting out to turbo-charge the command line terminal. In a blog post published yesterday, CEO and co-founder Brendan Falk said that ...
Industrial manufacturers face, on average, about 800 hours of unplanned downtime every year, or more than 15 hours per week, according to a recent report. The cost of unexpected troubleshooting, es...
Allseated, a platform that helps event organizers plan and showcase venues virtually, has raised $20 million in a debt round of funding*. Founded in 2011, Allseated serves a collaborative space-vis...
While working at his first startup, BrainGenie, a math and science skills practice website, Tim Zheng experienced firsthand the challenge of maintaining a small business — and expanding it. A...
Three senior executives are leaving Byju’s as part of a restructuring at the edtech group, the Indian startup said Tuesday. Mukut Deepak, who led the classes 4-10 business; Himanshu Bajaj, he...
During the pandemic, almost all retailers in Asia established an e-commerce presence and adopted digital payments. But one thing that didn’t change was sourcing, say the founders of cross-border ma...
The majority of Vietnam’s population live in rural areas and often lack access to financial services because banks and other institutions open most of their physical locations in cities. MFast want...
In just about three weeks, more than 10,000 startup leaders from across the globe will gather at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which takes place September 19–21 in San Francisco. It’s the mecca of the s...
It may be time to put to rest yet another effort to build a social network on a blockchain: The number of transactions on decentralized social network friend.tech has cratered after less than 20 da...
Kiki (formerly EasyRent), a subletting startup that matches listers with people looking to rent for up to six months, recently closed a $6 million seed round, its co-founder Toby Thomas-Smith exclu...
Klaviyo could be the torch bearer tech startups have been waiting for. Let’s dig into its IPO filing this morning to figure out how it’s grown.
Early-stage founders, TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 is so close to kickoff! Are you ready for an exciting mix of new ways to help your business grow bigger, better and faster? Here’s a brief rundown of s...
Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week.
The conversational commerce company developed a customer relationship management tool that provides customizable columns and sales funnel automation for sales made via WhatsApp and other social med...
Treatments like botox are becoming more ubiquitous, spurring growth in the number of medspas, or centers that offer botox, IV hydration and laser treatments from certified providers like registered...
Ihar Mahaniok designed Geek Ventures to provide immigrant-focused networking events so founders have an opportunity to grow their professional networks and break into the U.S. market.
Devolut enables merchants a returns option that doesn’t require boxes or labels. It also provides a network of “city points” where consumers can go to return merchandise.
Early-stage companies need to paint a compelling picture for another round of funding. That’s where startups often fall down. Here’s how to fix that.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. Better.com finally went public last week, and the stock’s performance was worse than ex...
Can startups help solve the U.S. housing crisis? BuildCasa thinks so. It raised a $3.5 million round of pre-seed funding to let California homeowners build new homes in their backyards.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Welcome to a...
Bitcoin-focused companies are falling behind as fewer checks are being written, according to Erik Svenson, co-founder and CFO of Blockstream.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, DocSend dropped a big load of statistics about the VC activity over the past half year or so. For TC+, I di...
Being aligned on these concepts will drive product roadmap, core technical architecture, pricing strategy and product marketing.
BusRight’s pitch deck is well-designed and full of careful touches.
Banking-as-a-service (BaaS), embedded finance and open banking are among the hottest topics in fintech today. The promise? Make opening a bank account, storing money, receiving a payment card and l...
This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news.
Byju’s, the edtech giant and India’s most valuable startup, has fixed a server-side misconfiguration that was exposing sensitive data of its students. The Indian startup exposed some st...
Real estate marketing is no walk in the park. Not only do realtors have to weather market volatility, but they need to meet buyers where they shop — creating compelling marketing experiences ...
Instant grocery delivery startup Zepto has raised $200 million in a new funding round at a valuation of $1.4 billion, it said Friday, at a time when most other firms in the category have either die...
Listen up, party people! You’re rapidly running out of time to host your own After Hours Event at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which runs September 19–21 in San Francisco. Build your brand, connect wit...
Advanced Ionics hopes its more efficient approach to using electrolysis will give it an unfair advantage in producing hydrogen.
From pricing new add-ons outright and raising prices for bundled offerings to simply getting an edge in negotiations, AI opens up a host of pricing strategies.
What do a chef in Turkey, a pilot in Australia, a physical therapist in Oregon, a submarine operator in the military and a DJ in the Bay Area all have in common? They are all members of Hustle Fund...
When Panobi co-founder Merci Grace began running growth at Slack in 2015, she helped grow the user base from 50,000 to more than 3 million in just a couple of years. Along the way, she learned some...
Large companies often have to produce marketing campaigns with thousands of pieces of individual content, including email and social media ads. This means creative teams have to execute ideas rapid...
Job references are an important part of hiring the right person, especially for remote positions. But the founders of Weekday say that more than 95% of recruiters don’t seek referrals from previous...
Generative artificial intelligence, used to create content from text to images to videos, is still on the rise. Big Tech and startups across the globe are racing to compete and launch their own AI-...
There are a growing number of cybersecurity regulations designed to keep business and customer data protected. In 2022 alone, more than 40 U.S. states introduced 250 bills focused on cybersecurity,...
At the outset, it may seem as if the lackluster state of the European venture market may have motivated OMERS’ exit, but it appears that wasn’t the case.
When Window Snyder started security infrastructure startup Thistle Technologies in 2020, she already had a decades-long career in cybersecurity under her belt. Snyder first made waves as a senior s...
What I like about Lex is that it makes for a good writing tool that is fast, simple to use, and uses AI to help writers instead of trying to supplant them.
This is our Wednesday show, in which we sit down with a guest, talk about their work and unpack the rest.
We’ve all seen headlines about major hacks and data breaches of major companies — it can feel like nobody’s safe. Security is a constant learning curve, and what we learn when things go...
The brain health brand took in its first institutional capital with plans to go into over 1,800 retail stores in the next year.
Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund is investing $1 billion in Reliance Retail as India’s largest retail chain looks to expand its operations and enter new categories. The Qatar Investment Au...
Kombai, a startup that aims to help front-end developers easily convert UI designs to code using AI, has emerged from stealth and announced a $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris V...
We’re in the less-than-30-day countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt 202 and the show’s crown jewel, the Startup Battlefield competition. You do not want to miss the global launching pad of some of ...
Acquiring a patent can open doors with investors, lead to joint partnerships, and even help immigrant founders in the U.S. obtain green cards.
Following rumors that it was exploring the sale of its weather business as part of a move to streamline operations, IBM says that it’s found a buyer for The Weather Company, the weather forec...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Feyi Ayodele, the co-founder and CEO of CancerIQ, a precision health company designed for ...
Fintech startup Ramp has raised $300 million in a funding round co-led by existing backer Thrive Capital and new investor Sands Capital at a post-money valuation of $5.8 billion. The Information re...
The list of reasons why venture investors don’t fund diverse startups is long, legion and ludicrous, to put it politely. Nontraditional founders still face a ridiculous uphill slog. Here’s so...
Despite the abundant venture capital available for startups in the current wave of generative AI breakthroughs, totaling $14 billion in equity funding as of August this year, Relume has turned down...
ScribeUp combines the find-and-cancel method of managing product subscriptions with automation and a virtual card that blocks unwanted subscriptions.
Grip Security, which provides businesses with the tools to protect their SaaS applications and describes itself as the “industry’s first SaaS security control plane,” today announ...
Before founding dipp, Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales and design proc...
Vice clauses often exclude the sex tech industry from most VCs’ investment areas, but the fervor around reproductive rights could drive the conversation forward for this industry.
After going on about tech IPOs and the ongoing drought for so long, I would like a change in theme, one driven by SEC filings and data.
Why should you go to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco on September 19–21? Let us count the reasons. We could hit double digits, but we’ll stop at five because you’re busy people with unicor...
Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week.
Twiga will conduct another round of layoffs to keep its business afloat amid macroeconomic headwinds that have made capital harder to raise, and forced venture-backed companies to scale down their ...
You won’t have to search very hard or go very far to engage in compelling conversations next month at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. In fact, you’ll find more than two dozen in the agenda — just look for...
In the past year, the company grew its membership base to over 1,000 brands and retailers and saw its year over year gross merchandise value run rate grow over 10 times.
Now with the Netherlands factory online, Enough is ramping up to produce over a tonne of Abunda every hour and around 10,000 metric tonnes per year.
VCs shouldn’t get too hung up on a company’s chances of winning an entire category, because most won’t. And that’s fine.
Hiring patent counsel is a critical step for inventors seeking to secure and maintain patent protection for their inventions.
Welcome back to The Interchange, where we take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. There was plenty going on as usual — with fintech investors sounding off, payments comp...
While we don’t have the numbers, it seems safe to assume Parade won’t be the only DTC startup to see a similar exit.
Anyone with a Costco card knows you save more when you buy in bulk. Now apply that same theory to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and you can save a bundle when you take your team, your clients or your st...
JPMorgan Chase doesn’t have the best reputation in the climate sector. But there’s some evidence to suggest the bank is turning a corner.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week, I’ve been looking at the evolution of tech startups. The journey from two or three co-founders to an exit o...
Two years ago, unicorns roamed the earth in herds so large, they shook the earth from Palo Alto to San Francisco.
Startups are so full of shit right now. The pipes are jammed and there are so many companies that are full to bursting with the desire to un-pack them. We’ve just been through determining the sha...
There could be good news just around the corner, provided services with generative AI become as powerful as expected, and are as in demand as hoped.
Just one more month until 20 of the world’s top early-stage startups take to the Disrupt Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco to vie for an equity-free, $100,000 prize. They’ll face to...
This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news, and having a little fun.
Research on the human microbiome — microorganism communities that live in a part of your body such as your mouth or gut — has led to a number of insights and spurred further investigati...
Defense-focused space technology startup True Anomaly has received key permits from regulators that will allow it to demonstrate imaging and rendezvous capabilities on-orbit for the first time. The...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Marco Zappacosta, the co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, a startup that runs a marketplace f...
As evidenced by the slow death of Cortana, it’s clear that the AI assistants of yesteryear aren’t meeting expectations. And so they’re being remade. Amazon is building a new large...
To help TechCrunch+ readers understand what fintech investors are thinking these days, we interviewed six active investors over the last couple of weeks.
Wonder Brands has since launched over 15 brands in the past 12 months and over 2,000 SKUs in the categories of home and garden, sports and fitness and beauty and personal care categories.
Appreciation isn’t just about gifts or praise. It’s about taking the employee — their experiences and interests — into consideration.
‘There would be all this pressure to go public, but then there wouldn’t be an appetite for it. And so [it would] be harder to get out.’
Agility Robotics is on a steady march toward commercialization, thanks to the continued growth of robotics in warehouse fulfillment and logistics and the expanding feature set of its bipedal robot....
As the buy now, pay later (BNPL) market continues on its slow decline, one of the major players, Splitit, is embarking on an effort to reorganize and pivot. Splitit today announced that it has a $6...
Just about one month to go until TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 kicks off in San Francisco on September 19-21. If you don’t have a pass yet, here’s a painless way to attend — for free. Volunteer at Tech...
We should forget the whole unicorn debate and instead ask: How many startups can reach the $100 million revenue mark for a given period?
OpenAI, the AI company behind the viral AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT, has acquired Global Illumination, a New York–based startup leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure and digital expe...
While we don’t have the data to prove it outright, it feels like women-led funds have had a particularly strong year for fundraising.
Launching two crypto funds totaling $1.5 billion is a thrilling accomplishment, especially for a woman in an industry that’s still male-dominated. It’s decidedly less thrilling when, just a f...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we sit down with a gues...
The company brings the entire product testing process under one umbrella and automates it so customers can set up their testing and get the product results they need quickly.
As consumers become more privacy aware, an increasing number of startups are emerging to — in line with the trend — enable people to monetize their data. Datacy, for example, lets users...
DynamoFL, which offers software to bring large language models (LLMs) to enterprises and fine-tune those models on sensitive data, today announced that it raised $15.1 million in a Series A funding...
Peak XV Partners is in advanced stages of deliberations to lead or fully finance a funding round in Neo Group, an asset management and financial advisory firm, three sources familiar with the matte...
This week, South African early-stage accelerator and investor Founders Factory Africa (FFA) raised $114 million. The firm plans to use the impact capital from Mastercard Foundation and Johnson &...
Given the hype around generative AI, it’s easy to forget that IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy in 2011 — and won a $1M first-place prize.
While funding to pre-seed startups has picked up pace, most of the deals being closed are more in favor of investors than the founders.
Robinhood launched a decade ago as a stock trading and investing app. During that time, it’s become a retail investment behemoth — but not without its share of controversy, including the GameStop t...
Traditionally, companies looking to extract data from websites have had to create custom code to get at the data, an expensive and time-consuming process that is often out of reach of smaller busin...
There hasn’t been a ton of research on the prevalence of mental health issues among founders, but what there is speaks loudly.
The unfortunate reality of being an investor is that the vast majority of inbound pitch decks are completely irrelevant to the investor. All VCs big and small have an investment thesis that outline...
Viewed today, the vintage sci-fi TV show Lost in Space was a hoot. But TechCrunch and the Aerospace Corporation are more interested in startups that can help protect people, crafts and cargo from t...
The demand for conversational AI — mostly chatbots — has arguably never been higher, riding the publicity wave of systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Last year, Gartner predicted that ...
The Startup Battlefield pitch competition is a Silicon Valley legend that’s reached far beyond its Bay Area beginnings. It’s a global launching pad for some of the most successful tech companies, i...
Monday.com is continuing its streak of quick growth following its IPO. In addition to reporting a 42% rise in its revenue for the second quarter of 2023, the cloud-based platform that lets users cr...
As the spend management space continues to get more competitive, the various players seem to be constantly iterating to add new features to their products. Today, fintech startup Brex announced it ...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday...
The new investment, an extension of a previous Series A round, enabled the company to open a third location in the Miami area.
It’s no secret that TechCrunch events feature the leading experts across the startup ecosystem, and TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which runs September 19–21 in San Francisco, is no exception to that rul...
Sara Behar Contributor Sara Behar is a content manager at YL Ventures, where she promotes the firm’s cybersecurity expertise and provides value-add support to the firm’s portfolio companies with co...
Here’s a reminder for students or recent grads. You’re the startup world’s future generation, and we’re investing in you. How? By offering passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 (September 19–21 i...
In this week’s edition of The Interchange, we touch on the resilience of BaaS in a sometimes messy fintech space, earnings highlights, and much more. If you want to receive this in your inbox every...
There has been a decline in SaaS net retention from Q1 2022 to Q1 2023.
For most startups it is hard to land a government contract but IVIX has landed multiple inside the U.S. and beyond.
You have just mere hours left to save a bundle on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco. At this point, perhaps you need the help of Saint Expeditus, the ...
We didn’t think we’d see the day. Digital mortgage lender Better.com’s proposal to combine with Aurora Acquisition Corp. via a SPAC (special purpose acquisition) has been approved by shareholders, ...
We sigh, as humans spool up to take a break, while the semi-sentient machines continue writing their poetry in their air-conditioned underground data-center homes. n my column this week, I spent a ...
Serve’s going public gives us the rare opportunity to closely follow a startup’s crucial, early growth days in a nascent market.
The unchecked rise of AI has captured headlines, causing extreme enthusiasm for its promise and considerable concern over its potential dangers. The mood swings between hype and fearmongering call ...
There are a million reasons why startups fail, and there are only a few reasons why they succeed.
Growth rounds usually get a traction-forward pitch, but there are many ways to weave that narrative. Let’s see how ANYbotics does it.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our...
Tick-tock, startup fans and aficionados. Today’s the last day to score serious savings to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. In fact, you have mere hours lef...
The company builds automated digital workers that can be used in lieu of human employees.
Hire experienced talent early, allocate 10% of revenue to marketing, and continue dividing team responsibilities as you scale.
Fizz, a burgeoning social network established by two Stanford dropouts, captured the attention and interest of Stanford University students early on with its approach to anonymity and engagement. N...
Many companies grapple with data challenges. In a 2019 survey, Deloitte reports that 67% of executives aren’t comfortable accessing or using the data at their organizations. In a separate pol...
Veo, one of the shared micromobility firms that secured New York City’s e-scooter permit, is moving into retail. Starting Thursday, the company will be selling its Cosmo X seated, pedal-less ...
Tracer, a platform that attempts to consolidate an organization’s data sources and enrich them with business insights, today announced that it raised $18.1 million in a Series A funding round...
At some point we have to acknowledge that the worst is behind us, and any remaining malaise is potentially psychosomatic.
The relationship between fintechs and incumbents has long been fraught with tension. But Marie-Elise Droga believes it doesn’t have to be this way. Droga joined payments giant Visa as SVP, he...
When a major system incident occurs, there is a ton of online and offline communication going on — or at least there should be. The online part creates a digital audit trail of what happened ...
This is the final 48-hour countdown to serious savings on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which runs September 19–21 in San Francisco. Take five minutes now to secure the best price on passes to...
Basys combines generative AI and deep learning to power its “engine” which can automate up to 90% of the prior authorization requests for drugs and procedures at high accuracy.
Rootly, a startup developing a platform to help automate companies’ responses to incidents like website outages, today announced that it raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by ...
Wint, a so-called “water intelligence” company that says it uses AI to detect and stop leaks, has raised $35 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in Israel in 2011, Wint has ...
Osano, an Austin, Texas-based startup developing a platform to help companies manage their data privacy, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series B funding round led by Baird Capital ...
We’ve seen the rise of no-code and low-code platforms being applied to any number of applications and use cases. What would happen if this thinking were applied to metaverse-style virtual worlds? W...
I’ve decided to move forward and found my own startup in the U.S. What’s the best way for me to be able to stay in the U.S. and work legally?
The architecture, engineering and construction industries involve giant concrete molds that are expensive, slow to manufacture and often only used a few times before being disposed. Robots-as-a-ser...
Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, has released an updated version of its faster, cheaper, text-generating model available through an API, Claude Instant. The updated Claude I...
In the world of electric vehicles, batteries and renewable energy systems, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone more experienced than JB Straubel. We’re excited to welcome Straubel, founder and CEO...
Microplastics are everywhere — quite literally, as study after study shows. And while we can’t do much about the tiny, toxic particles already in our oceans, waterways and bodies, we can try ...
As organizations embrace cloud services — and are forced to confront changing regulations and data use standards — their ability to maintain control of data security frequently becomes ...
It can be a good idea to raise venture capital to scale a business with highly valuable revenue, provided you can generate operating leverage later.
Press pause on procrastination, and you’ll be rewarded with the sweet sound of cha-ching! We’re in the 72-hour window, folks — that’s all the time you have left to save on passes to TechCrunch Disr...
This week, Dominic-Madori Davis came back to chat with Mary Ann and Alex about a lawsuit targeting a grant program for Black women who run small businesses.
One of the more prolific AI and machine learning development platforms, Weights & Biases has secured a new tranche of cash from ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and former Y Combinator partner Daniel...
Sweet Security, a Tel Aviv-based cloud security startup, today announced that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from CyberArk Ventures and a ...
U.S. cybersecurity giant Rapid7 has announced plans to lay off 18% of its workforce, affecting more than 400 global employees. In a regulatory filing, the Boston-based cybersecurity company said it...
Atmosfy, an app that helps you discover restaurants and local businesses through short-form videos, has raised $12 million in seed funding led by Redpoint Ventures. The app lets you explore dining,...
Last year, Jonas Heineman was overseeing a team of commercial project managers as they installed hundreds of electric vehicle charging stations. Heineman’s wife was also pregnant with their f...
Back in 2021 and early 2022, there was a flurry of VC interest in Southeast Asian investment apps. One of them was Singapore-based Endowus, which raised two rounds in rapid succession: a Series A i...
Sendy, a Kenyan logistics startup that enabled retailers to purchase FMCGs directly from manufacturers, among other services, is shutting down its operations and exploring a sale of its assets, Tec...
It wasn’t the first, but for more than 10 years, Kickstarter has been synonymous with crowdfunding. We’re excited to announce that CEO Everette Taylor will join us on the Hardware Stage...
We’ve identified five lessons that the next generation of robotics founders can take from the successes and failures of the AV industry.
Hot takes will not help your startup gain media traction. Reporters are looking for actual expertise and opinions supported by facts and experience.
Frankly, we deserve some adventurous venture capital after so many monhts of dreary conversations about cash flow.
Nvidia is partnering with AI startup Hugging Face to expand access to AI compute. Timed to coincide with the annual SIGGRAPH conference this week, Nvidia announced that it’ll support a new Hu...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. On this week’s episode of Found, Becca and Dom are joined by Anurupa Ganguly, the founder at CEO at Prisms, a startup desi...
Here in the States, summer’s slipping away all too soon, but not as fast as your chance to save on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco. Disrupt is the s...
Cybersecurity startups, in particular those hatched in Israel, have been getting scooped up at a rapid pace by larger tech companies looking to bolt on new capabilities to address business customer...
India’s popular online gaming and fantasy sports startup Mobile Premier League is reducing its staff by approximately 50%, two people familiar with the matter said, weeks after New Delhi unve...
The customer data platform (CDP) has become a standard way to collect first-party customer data and put it to work. Simon Data, which was founded in 2015, has always had a vision of being more than...
Chargeflow, a startup using AI to fight chargeback fraud, today announced that it raised $11 million in a seed round led by the VC firm OpenView Venture Partners. The tranche builds on Chargeflow&#...
Svatantra Microfin has reached an agreement to acquire Navi Group’s microfinancing unit Chaitanya India for about $178.5 million, the two firms said Tuesday, latest in a series of events at e...
Cybersecurity funding is falling after enjoying impressive heights in the last few years. According to Crunchbase, VC financing for security declined to just over $1.6 billion in Q2 2023, marking a...
Proptech startup Dongnae said Tuesday it plans to acquire Stevens, a South Korean company that operates co-living business Dears. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price, but Dongn...
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which runs September 19–21 in San Francisco, is the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, venture partners, CEOs, engineers, scientists, policy makers, researchers a...
The new funding will help Meatable scale its processes and accelerate the launch of its first products — sausages and pork dumplings — in Singapore starting in 2024.
Investors, we’re back with a reminder that TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 — happening September 19–21 in San Francisco — can help you pump up your pipeline and dial up your deal flow. Are you ready to hun...
Sadly, while Triller is an interesting business, it may prove too small an offering to fully unlock the domestic IPO market for technology companies.
As a founder, you can get the most out of legal help by deploying a few smart strategies that won’t break the bank or blow your budget.
In its continued attempt to diversify its product offerings, Zoom today launched a new asynchronous video tool, Zoom Clips, that lets users record, edit and share video clips without having to hop ...
Here’s a public service announcement from Captain Obvious: It takes a lot of money to build a startup. At a time when every dollar counts, this is a reminder that you have only 5 days left to save ...
One Model, a platform that uses AI to help employers make decisions about recruiting, hiring, promotions, layoffs and general workplace planning, today announced that it’s raised $41 million ...
It was an eventful week in fintech startup land, and we did our best to capture the highlights. We covered some raises, new product lines, at least one M&A deal and more. Oh, and if you want to...
Retaining mobile app subscribers is harder than it was last year, but paywall optimization and gamified UX can help.
Tiger Global sold its Flipkart stake at a valuation 7% below the startup’s last primary round. This outcome isn’t likely to happen again.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it does not intend to recommend an enforcement action against digital mortgage lender Better.com. The pronouncement comes after an investigati...
In case you missed it, July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. On the bright-ish side, research shows that 69% of Americans want our nation to become carbon neutral by 2050. Achievi...
It’s not all rosy for companies that put growth first back when it was sexy to reach for the skies, and now find themselves in a market that favors a quick, viable and visible path to profita...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday morning. State-sponsored bad actors have long been able to make “deepfake” videos that are good enough to t...
The appetite for hardware to train AI models is voracious. AI chips are forecast to account for up to 20% of the $450 billion total semiconductor market by 2025, according to McKinsey. And The Insi...
It’s clear that AI is driving the latest hype cycle, but how are early-stage investors sorting the wheat from the chaff these days?
The U.K has taken the first steps to make its venture landscape more equitable. The U.S. could take notes.
A big heads-up and a hearty shoutout to all you savvy startup shoppers, budget-minded founders and tech enthusiasts who love to hang on to your money. You have just one week left to save on passes ...
As the world returns to “normal,” what does the future of work look like from where we are today? To find out, we spoke with 6 founders in relevant sectors.
For our 60th pitch deck teardown, we’re taking a closer look at a $1.5 million pre-seed round and the deck that helped raise it.
As we saw with the collapse of FTX, the web3 space leaves a lot to be desired in terms of transparent information about companies, fundings, management and a slew of other data that really is commo...
EventMobi, an event management software provider based in Toronto, Canada, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Run The World, an Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)-backed platform for online ...
Lula, a startup which aims to be the “Stripe for insurance,” has raised $35.5 million in a Series B funding round after experiencing a massive surge in customers. When TechCrunch report...
Endor Labs, which offers a platform developers can use to manage and secure their open source dependencies, today closed a $70 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with partici...
There is no question that this market is tough for tech startups. But even in tough markets, there are many survivors.
Long before people were talking about ChatGPT and generative AI, companies like Datasaur were dealing with the nuts and bolts of building machine learning models, helping label things to train the ...
As organizations rush to embrace AI, it’s putting the cloud — or clouds, rather — under strain. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, facing an unprecedented spike in...
Pockit, an app that offers financial services to people “underserved by traditional banks,” as the startup describes it, announced today that it raised $10 million in a funding round le...
Several years ago, Zach Epstein was leading marketing measurement initiatives at Google, helping large corporate customers to build out measurement infrastructure. After leaving the tech giant, Eps...
HackerOne, a widely known bug bounty and penetration testing platform, is cutting up to 12% of its workforce as the global economic slowdown continues to impact the tech community. The San Francisc...
I was accepted into a prestigious robotics engineering master’s program in the U.S. but the denial rate for F-1 student visas is increasing. Why?
Get ready to create startup magic at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. It’s the startup world’s big tent, a magnet of opportunity and prime networking real ...
For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who...
Python enjoys great popularity with developers, which is why the founders of Reflex chose it as the basis for their low-code web app development platform. The startup, formerly known as Pynecone, w...
The platform offers tools and infrastructure so that visual artists can be discovered and sell their art.
In late 2017, three entrepreneurs — Abhinav Das, Aditya Bhatia and Akash Bansal — came to the mutual realization that the final steps of building furniture — specifically painting...
We all know how important data quality is. That’s where the timeless phrase “Garbage in, garbage out” came from. As the pace of data creation accelerates, and it gets used in a variety ...
With a sound strategy to convert your leads, you can be well on your way to a successful paid acquisition campaign.
Indian logistics startup Shadowfax is finalizing a funding round of about $60 million, more than a year after it began the funding deliberations, two sources familiar with the matter said. TPG NewQ...
The competition in the spend management space continues to intensify. Brex and Rho today each announced AI-powered/enabled accounts payables offerings. Their announcements coincidentally came out t...
As many entrepreneurs jump on the AI bandwagon, investors are being choosey about which kinds of companies they back.
Allo, a new financial app that can be described as Headspace for personal finance, is aiming to help users meaningfully engage with their finances without becoming overwhelmed with numbers and spen...
“Building a plane in mid-air” is something Silicon Valley visionaries love to say, but it has little to do with the iterative work of developing software.
We’re out-of-this-world excited to announce that we’ve added a dedicated Space Stage to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. It joins six other brand-new industry-focused stages — all under one big roof. Plus,...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. Listen to the full conversation here. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Rebecca Rosenberg, the founder and CEO of ReBokeh, a...
Since its launch two years ago, ConfiAbogado has grown its client base to over 250 new clients each month.
If you ask Pankaj Patel, there’s too much complexity in networks today — particularly enterprise networks. Complexity has been engineered into enterprise networks over a period of decad...
Socket, a startup that provides a scanning tool to detect security vulnerabilities in open source code, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a1...
Neon, a startup that’s building a serverless open source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres, today announced that it raised around $46 million in a new funding round, about $30 million of whi...
Watermarking an image is a practice that has value across countless domains, but these days it’s more difficult than just adding a logo in the corner. Steg.AI lets creators embed a nearly inv...
The U.S. index fund pioneer Vanguard has cut the worth of its holding in the Indian ride-hailing startup Ola by more than half since original investment, according to an analysis of its filings. Va...
Indian entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of ride-hailing firm Ola and electric vehicle startup Ola Electric, is venturing into fresh terrain as he navigates his businesses toward initial pu...
Remedial Health, a Nigerian startup digitizing pharmacies and bringing efficiency to the pharmaceutical value chain, has raised $12 million Series A equity-debt funding to scale operations in the W...
Observability and security platform Dynatrace today announced that it plans to acquire Rookout, a Tel Aviv-based observability startup that focuses on helping developers troubleshoot and debug thei...
It appears single-digit revenue multiples are all that’s within reach of unprofitable tech companies with growth rates in the low double-digits.
When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010, they basically invented photo-based social networking in the modern mobile era. Fast-forward to 2012 and a $1 billion acquisition b...
New Relic, the San Francisco-based observability software company, has reached an agreement with private equity firms TPG and Francisco Partners to go private in a $6.5 billion all-cash deal. As re...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday...
Travel is back on the agenda after a COVID-19 hiatus, and today a mobile startup is announcing a healthy round of funding to capitalize on that. Airalo — which uses software-based eSIM connec...
Bloom has an Instagram-like structure that provides educational material and quizzes for reinforcement. The better you do on the quizzes, the more points you get to spend in the app.
The company added a social media hub for automated posts and ads as well as an AI-enabled “Super Assistant” to help with navigating through the application and digitizing customer interactions....
Vineet Rao, co-founder and chief executive of Indian social commerce DealShare, has stepped down from the top role, the Tiger Global- and Alpha Wave Global-backed startup said Monday. Rao will work...
Fidelity has slashed the estimated worth of its holding in SaaS startup Gupshup by over 20% in a month and by more than 50% since the original investment in the latest brutal markdown across privat...
Walmart paid $1.4 billion to buy out Tiger Global’s remaining holding of Flipkart shares as the retail giant further expands its stake in the Indian e-commerce startup. The transaction took p...
In this week’s edition of The Interchange, we touch on M&As in the fintech space as AngelList nabbed a startup and Uplift got bought for less than it raised in venture funding. We get into thos...
If you’re adventurous with your food, or just like to keep up with the fast-moving food tech industry, here’s a roundup of this week’s stories and some notable news we weren’t able to cover. Supply...
“Founders first” is the TechCrunch credo — this is the way — and you’ll find the very best and brightest minds in the startup ecosystem gathered at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 1...
The startup is building a machine, VitalOne, that can perform more than 50 blood tests and get patient results back in 20 minutes.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Not to get all GrumpyManYellsAtCloud.gif, but I’m getting pretty tired of the myth of the dropped-out-of-college found...
Even with some details omitted, we get a great picture of the company’s narrative structure.
Replacing a CEO is a complicated process: senior executives and board members should be in alignment, and founders must be ready to let go.
Pitch in space! Okay, not really, but we do have exciting news for early-stage AI/ML startups. The Aerospace Corporation and TechCrunch are hosting a pitch competition at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, w...
According to the Crunchbase Web3 Tracker, funding to crypto startups around the world is on pace to notch its seventh-consecutive quarterly decline.
While SAFEs are generally considered founder friendly, when you get into the details it’s less clear why they would be over priced rounds.
After a few years of being background noise, AI has suddenly become ubiquitous. From consumer apps to enterprise tools to medical devices, nearly everything claims to be “powered by AI”...
AngelList, an organization that started out by teaming up founders with early-stage investors, is expanding into the private equity space. And it’s acquired a Y Combinator-backed fintech startup in...
The company offers comprehensive women’s healthcare, either in-person or virtual, and one of its differentiators is that the average appointment is between 20 and 60 minutes.
Meet Pollen, a new French startup that wants to provide a better way to learn new skills. Instead of working with full-time teachers, Pollen invites business executives and top performers in the te...
One of the best ways startup founders can hone their pitch until it’s sharp enough to impress VCs — and bring home the bacon — is by watching other founders pitch to investors. And there’s no bette...
Universe, the no-code mobile website builder, announced today that it’s launching an AI-powered website designer in beta. The designer, called GUS (Generative Universe Sites), can help anyone...
The company has built up a base of employer clients, including Adobe, Ceridian and Rexford Industrial, eager to offer an employer-sponsored benefit for employees with pets.
Helpful’s app brings insurance benefits, medical records and caregiving resources into one place.
Building a diverse and inclusive startup is the right thing to do, both ethically and economically. If you’re a founder who cares about equity, it begins with choosing co-founders and employees who...
GlossGenius, a platform designed to handle bookings and payments for salons and spas, today announced that it raised $28 million in a Series C funding round led by L Catterton with participation fr...
As one of the well-known data and cloud martech companies in Africa, Terragon, via several products, gives its clients (primarily telecommunications and financial services companies) data on the co...
The company seeks to digitize the rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) financial technique often used by ethnic communities.
FarmWorks, a Kenyan agtech that provides farmers with access to farm inputs, and market for their produce, has raised $4.1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Acumen Resilient Agriculture Fund, ...
Business is regularly won and lost on the strength of a proposal. Now, a startup out of London called AutogenAI has built a tool based on generative AI that it claims can help businesses write stro...
Fundraising is hard, so it’s no wonder that SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) rounds are popular. Conceived by Y Combinator as an alternative to convertible notes, SAFEs have long been cons...
I have a business plan and a market plan, but no immigration plan. What’s your advice? Which visa should I apply for?
When Graft launched its AI development platform in beta last year, it was looking to build something that put AI within reach of every company, not just the largest ones with tons of engineering re...
Effectiv developed AI-driven payment fraud detection, verification and compliance tools as well as models that are trained to detect that simulated behavior.
Shai Gabay and Eli Ben Nun, two entrepreneurs based in Israel, met in 2018 while working at Cynet, a cybersecurity startup developing extended detection and response tools. While there, they came t...
Dioxycle is a carbon transformation startup that is working on a new process to produce ethylene at scale using recycled carbon emissions. Ethylene is used in packaging, clothing, PVC-based sewage ...
It would be fair to say there’s no global solution for instant 24/7 access to mental health support. Yes, there are a few “marketplaces” where you can schedule a call with a therapist i...
The company seeks to enhance zero-net technologies in a way that gives higher performance and sustainability at lower costs.
A traction slide is your chance to show off and build investor confidence. But what if your startup doesn’t have any wins to boast about?
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco, and it’s our biggest Disrupt ever. More than 10,000 attendees, seven new industry-specific programming stages (we just added...
San Francisco startup Ample is bringing its modular electric vehicle battery swapping technology to Mitsubishi Fuso’s electric trucks this winter, the company said Tuesday. This marks the fir...
In September of 2021, Jeeves began offering corporate credit cards as its primary product — with a primary focus on Latin America — after participating in Y Combinator’s summer 2020 batch. By that ...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Mandy Price, the co-founder and CEO at Kanarys, a SaaS startup that helps companies tackle...
When Nexla launched a data operations platform at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2017, building applications on top of that data was not necessarily a well understood concept. As time has gone o...
As the role of the fund-of-funds model changes, this new version could prove to be the perfect vehicle to help diverse and emerging fund managers.
As organizations grow, it becomes harder to understand what’s happening operationally across departments inside a company. We tend to use meetings to try and figure out what others are doing,...
Stay Ai developed a recurring commerce enablement platform for subscriptions, clubs and memberships with loyalty tools to help brands increase customer lifetime value.
Brevel developed a proprietary technology that combines fermentation and light to make a protein from microalgae that is sold to food companies as a powder for use in plant-based products.
Solink, a company that provides physical security systems for businesses, including closed-circuit camera analytics, today announced that it raised $60 million in a Series C round led by Goldman Sa...
Prosus, one of the largest investors in Byju’s, expressed its disappointment in the edtech giant’s reporting and governance practices on Tuesday, a month after all the key investors qui...
We’re less than two months away from TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which takes place September 19–21 in San Francisco. If you’re looking for a no-cash-flow way to go, listen up. We have the perfect oppo...
Plans by Kenya’s Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) to withdraw its second case against African fintech giant Flutterwave have been shot down by the High Court, Kenya’s third highest court. In Augu...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the w...
Remote working and digital nomads became two very prominent aspects of the world of work during the pandemic, shedding light on the millions of people who live in one country but earn money in anot...
In less than two months, 20 of the world’s most impressive startups will compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Francisco. Which companies will make...
As Europe grapples with cannabis legalization, what can it learn from the US’ journey?
Welcome to The Interchange! If you want this in your inbox, sign up here. It was an event-filled week in the fintech world, what with FedNow launching, the former CEO of fintech Bolt — and th...
Large companies with over 5,000 developers struggle with API sprawl, according to a recent Postman survey.
Futureverse is making tools that brands can use to build content for the metaverse, but not the one that Meta is envisioning.
Like Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” deal flow is an insatiable beast — but without the bloodshed. Investors need to keep their pipelines primed, and the best place to find early-stage start...
If you only tracked American insurtech companies that went public recently, you might think insurtech is in its flop era. Thankfully, that’s not true.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. It seems like the fizzle has gone out of the VR conversation altogether, as every manufacturer and conversation is ref...
There’s a lot of performative behavior in startup land, such as foosball tables in reception areas and kitchens with kombucha taps.
CB Insights released its Q2 State of Fintech report last week, and unsurprisingly, global funding in the space was down — plunging by nearly half to $7.8 billion, its lowest level since 2017....
Despite current culture wars turning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies into a political punching bag, most business leaders understand that they’re very good for business. Yet in a mor...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday show, when we take a look at the weekR...
Cruise, the self-driving arm of General Motors, has begun initial testing and data collection in Miami, the company said in a tweet Wednesday. “Phase 1 is to familiarize our fleet with additi...
Whether you’re short on time or short on cash, you can still find plenty of exciting opportunities at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19-21 in San Francisco. The Expo+ pass is the p...
A new report from Capchase found that SaaS company growth wasn’t as tied to venture-capital backing as founders likely thought.
There’s a discussion in tech that the idea that software companies will grow and become increasingly profitable over time is at least partially incorrect.
Amazon might have the monopoly on physical goods sold online. But what about digital ones? There’s Steam for games and software. Shopify supports some forms of digital goods, like artwork and...
There are a few reasons why women don’t get as much investor interest as men, and none is surprising: extreme gender bias, starting at the pitch stage.
Collectly customers have, on average, been able to increase patient collections for medical group partners by 75% and reduce the “days sales outstanding” to 12 days from between 60 and 90 days....
InDrive (formerly inDriver) is bringing a new type of ride-hailing app to South Florida. The startup operates a “bid-based” platform wherein passengers can name their own fare for a rid...
The Startup Battlefield pitch competition is the crown jewel of Disrupt, and we can’t wait to see which of the Startup Battlefield 200 companies will be selected to pitch to panels of top-tier VCs ...
With the cost of living ever more painful, and generative AI supposedly gunning for your job, at least — for the moment — it might be here to save you some money on your household bills. U.K.-based...
Gushwork.ai, a global platform that aims to advance business process outsourcing (BPO) using AI and human expertise, has raised $2.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed. B Capital...
Python is the preferred programming language in AI. However, most organizations can’t incorporate their Python developers into legacy data infrastructure. That means they miss out on pulling the be...
With more than 750,000 H-1B registrations this year, is it realistic for my startup to consider hiring candidates who are seeking them?
A recent report said that Indonesia’s electric vehicle (EV) market is projected to reach $20 billion by 2029, up from $533 million in 2022. Moreover, as much as half of the overall motorbike ...
Created to ensure open and free access to the internet, Snowflake saw a huge uptick in users during the start of the Ukraine War — and has grown even more since then. Started as an open sourc...
SAFE rounds, or simple agreements for future equity, have been around since Y Combinator invented them a decade ago. But they took on a different role in 2021 when they became a fast-moving tool th...
Only three fintech startups have actually seen their secondary valuations increase since January 2022: HR/payroll startups Rippling, Gusto and Deel.
Dunzo, a hyperlocal delivery startup in India, is postponing employee salaries for a month and plans a new wave of layoffs as soon as Thursday as the Google and Reliance Retail-backed startup pares...
The modern world is a concrete jungle, and cement — a binding agent — is concrete’s key ingredient. It’s also one of the least climate-friendly materials. Used for housing, transportation and comme...
Despite earning six-to-seven-figure-a-year incomes, many content creators are denied the capital they need to expand their businesses. The reasons vary, but most are relatively young and have limit...
Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 are the building blocks for an increasing number of AI applications. But some enterprises have been reluctant to adopt them, owing to their...
In case one needed more evidence that there’s a massive appetite for generative AI, SAP, the Germany-based consulting giant, yesterday invested in three major generative AI players: Anthropic...
Umbra co-founder Gabe Dominocielo’s last name is roughly translated from the Latin as “lord of the skies.” It’s a fitting title for the head of a satellite imagery company — but in a recent i...
The company offers a test kit and tests for 17 biomarkers in the areas of inflammation, cardiovascular health, metabolic fitness and hormone balance.
Jahn Karsybaev and Adil Nurgozhin met while at the University of Montana and launched five startups together before forming Big Sky Capital.
CodeSee was founded in 2019 with the goal of helping programmers understand the entire code base inside a company. The idea was to provide visual maps, so you could see the connections between serv...
Hightouch, a platform that helps companies sync customer data across different back-end databases and systems, today announced that it raised $38 million in a funding round that values the startup ...
Interest in AI among the enterprise continues to rise, with one recent survey finding that nearly two-thirds of companies plan to increase or maintain their spending on AI and machine learning into...
Africa’s insurance market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% between 2022 and 2028, reaching $120 billion. Though seemingly impressive, the insurance industry in Afri...
Musinsa, a Seoul-based fashion marketplace, said Wednesday it has raised a $190 million round of Series C funding led by KKR, with participation from Wellington Management. The new capital put Musi...
Over a year following the inaugural season of “Shark Tank India,” the seven esteemed investors made good on less than half of their investment pledges, according to a new analysis, the ...
A backer of the Lensa AI app, which sent AI-generated images from Stable Diffusion rocketing into mainstream social media, has just exited a company for a substantial amount of money, say well-plac...
Cameo, a website for ordering video greetings from celebrities, is downsizing again. The Chicago startup, which was valued at more than $1 billion in 2021, intends to lay off 80 workers. Reached by...
The yardstick for measuring performance has changed, but changing startup performance standards mean that we need a new baseline for ‘fast growth.’
Feeling pretty confident about the marketing slides you’ve prepared for your upcoming board meeting? If so, you may be on the wrong track.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Catherine Tabor, the founder and CEO of Sparkfly, a company that helps brands with marketi...
Artificial intelligence has had a major impact over the years in the finance sector, helping neobanks personalize services for customers, lenders evaluate loan applications, digital providers detec...
Telegram has raised $210 million through bond sales this week from a number of investors, including its founder and chief executive Pavel Durov, as it navigates the slowing economy that has evapora...
Running a multi-cloud strategy where you use different cloud vendors for different workloads helps companies avoid vendor lock-in and lets them use the best-of-breed tools across different platform...
In the 7.5 years I’ve served as TechCrunch’s hardware editor, I’ve been struck by just how profoundly deep and wide this category can be. Scope is one of the most fulfilling and frustrating parts o...
After years of growth, funding for cybersecurity startups is beginning to slow down, a symptom of the broader economic malaise and — perhaps — market oversaturation. According to a rece...
Polar Analytics gives each brand a so-called “knowledge worker,” that aggregates all of the different data sources so that users can then pose questions about the data.
Data may be “the new oil,” but only when it can be extracted and put to use. Today, a five-year-old startup called Hammerspace that is giving any kind of data that lease of life is anno...
Komi, a digital storefront for content creators and celebrities, today announced its public launch along with new features, including the ability to sell products across multiple online stores in o...
Troubled e-bike maker VanMoof — which had raised a total of $189.1 million from the likes of Balderton Capital and Felix Capital, among other investors — has now officially gone bankrupt in the Net...
When it comes to transforming business operations, artificial intelligence holds a lot of promise across many industries. Today, a startup that has been an early mover in the area of applying AI, a...
Another grim stage for VanMoof, the e-bike startup backed by venture capitalists to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. After making a last-hour effort to stave off bankruptcy last week, t...
Identity verification platform for businesses Bureau has added $4.5 million in its Series A, bringing its total to $16.5 million. The funding was raised from GMO Venture Partners and GMO Payment Ga...
London-based climate intelligence startup Sylvera has closed another chunky funding round — bagging $57 million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from existing ...
When talking to data-driven board members, stick with what can be measured: marketing’s contribution to the near-term pipeline.
The market allowed tech companies to be unprofitable for a while and that era is now ending. But the matter is more nuanced if you think more long term.
Mukesh Bansal of Indian fashion e-commerce giant Myntra and fitness platform Cult.fit fame is evaluating a new venture. Even though he hasn’t yet decided on his exact plans for the new offeri...
Siqi Chen, the former president of Sandbox VR, the brick-and-mortar VR experience franchise, didn’t always have a strong grasp of finance. And it’s something he felt self-conscious abou...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the w...
Sheela Foam, the maker of the mattress brand Sleepwell, will be acquiring a 35% stake in furniture startup Furlenco, the publicly listed firm said Monday as it pushes for a bigger share of India...
We firmly believe that all founders must have access to the tech world’s immense opportunities — and to our events. The TechCrunch Include Founders program is designed to promote and increase diver...
Between Instrument 1 and Orba, Artiphon has established itself as the maker of innovative — and delightful — music instruments. Today the Nashville-based hardware startup returns to the...
Six months after raising a $7 million seed round, Herself Health is back with some additional venture capital to expand its clinic footprint.
Founding a company is a big deal, and taking on the CEO role to drive that company forward is an important choice. Some founders are able to lead their startups all the way through the process of c...
Welcome back to The Interchange! If you want this in your inbox, sign up here. When it came to fintech news, we saw a pretty sluggish first half of 2023, and that is evidenced by the sobering fundi...
If cybersecurity isn’t recession-proof, generative AI and animal agriculture might be.
Performance Livestock Analytics spun out from Zoetis because the startup thought it could achieve better scale on its own.
This week brought in good news for the robotics space in the form of new investment for nascent companies, but two established players within the space hit a snag. Amazon’s potential $1.7 billion a...
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. As a photographer, the saga of Amazon buying Digital Photo Review (DPReview among friends) before slowly grinding it i...
Everything I’ve outlined should take an estimated 4-5 weeks from our first phone call. That puts it at Week 6 for a signed term sheet.
There’s good reason to believe that the massive correction in venture capital activity that we’ve seen over the past six quarters has run its course.
My high school football team won a few state championships, but sportswriters never asked how much ground we lost to penalties.
While seed-focused VCs are enjoying this market, other investors are pulling out and deal count numbers are down.
The creator monetization platform Fanhouse announced yesterday that it was acquired by Passes, a similar startup that only launched in beta in December. “We only hopped on a call maybe 36 hours ago...
Looking for a creative way to connect with a specific community at TechCrunch at Disrupt 2023? Our After Hours initiative is a great way to network in a relaxed, fun and meaningful way. Plus, we’ll...
GoodBuy Gear’s deck is not without its challenges, but there’s a lot to love, including some unusual choices that really worked out for the team.
Emmeline Ventures invests in women founders building businesses that help other women manage their health, wealth and environment.
Flipkart commenced a $700 million “one-time discretionary” cash payout to employees on Friday, the single-largest such compensation in the Indian startup ecosystem. The Walmart-backed B...
African startups clashing with regulators due to non-compliance are often faced with far-reaching consequences, including some that render their businesses defunct or inoperable in some markets ...
Last year, when venture capital’s fiery streak cooled, climate tech held strong with tens of billions in deals despite geopolitical instability, hiked-up interest rates and crypto chaos. Stil...
Suffolk Technologies decided to raise outside capital instead of being a CVC to increase its scale and what resources it could offer founders.
When you synthesize data at a high level, you risk creating numbers that are green at a glance, but red under the surface.
The U.S. VC market has seemingly found a new normal: the number of deals and amount of dollars invested in startups so far this year is stabilizing.
What do doorbells, smart plugs and pet feeders have in common? They’re just some of the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices vulnerable to hacks. These popular, often minimally protected, d...
There are a number of companies in the U.S. that offer revenue-based financing to SaaS companies, including Capchase, Pipe, Founderpath and Arc. But the options for South Asian companies are far mo...
Artificial intelligence has been a big theme in the world of health and medical research, and specifically in the area of drug discovery. Today, another hopeful in the space is announcing a funding...
Spline, a no-code design tool for creating 3D assets, today announced that it raised $15 million in a seed round led by Gradient Ventures with participation from First Round Capital, NXTP, Chapter ...
Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, announced today that it’s launching a new product called “Boost Mode.” The new feature allows brands on the platform to turn cont...
In the past year, the company formed an exclusive commercial alliance with academic content platform Santillana, which services over 2 million students in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
Skill-Lync, an Indian startup offering upskilling programs, has laid off 20% of its workforce — around 225 employees — to reduce operational costs amid the ongoing global funding crunch for startup...
In 2015, Pieter Danhieux and Matias Madou, both cybersecurity analysts, came to the realization that they wanted to provide a way to make software more secure by empowering developers with the skil...
Sophie Alcorn Contributor Share on X Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneu...
Swiggy has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire LYNK, a retail logistics startup with a network of over 100,000 stores, the latest in a series of purchases by the Indian food delivery gia...
Keeping apace of the latest trends and innovation in climate tech and sustainability — an area that touches every industry and city — is nearly impossible. It’s why we created the Sustainabil...
CapStack, a startup formed by Pipe co-founder Michal Cieplinski, has raised $6 million toward its effort to build an integrated operating system for banks. In simpler terms, Cieplinski described Ca...
With the Nature’s One acquisition, Bobbie becomes the third-largest fully integrated brand in the U.S. and will grow to a 15% non-WIC market share.
French startup Swile shared some revenue metrics just a year after merging with Bimpli, the employee benefits division of BPCE. Swile’s main product is a payment card for employee benefits, such as...
We’ve seen the rise of the customer data platform (CDP) in recent years as a central repository for collecting data about customers to better understand their needs. It’s worth noting that Tw...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a single t...
Despite declining funding levels and higher rate of attacks, cybersecurity investors remain optimistic. Here’s why.
Inngest, an open source startup that helps developers build and manage serverless queues, background jobs and workflows, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by GGV. Co-fo...
A year after launch, the marketplace has tens of thousands of customers, has over 400% revenue growth and added new food items like meat and dairy.
Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam have plenty of experience in the health tech space, having sold their first startup, health app maker Praxify, to Athenahealth. Now the duo are focused on value-bas...
In 2012, after moving to the Bay Area, Ashton Braun set out to build a platform that could solve some of the inefficiencies in food and agricultural supply chains. He experienced these inefficienci...
The demand for offshore wind has skyrocketed, like all renewable energy sources — but the necessary work of surveying, inspecting and mapping coastal areas is stuck in the past. Bedrock’s aut...
Resemble AI, a platform that uses generative AI to clone realistic-sounding voices, today announced that it raised $8 million in a Series A round led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation...
InvGate works with enterprise and mid-size companies, offering a SaaS solution to streamline their IT operations.
Tricentis, a test automation platform that has acquired quite a few testing services and startups over the years, is making another M&A move with the acquisition of Waldo, an automated testing ...
San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Coalition is acquiring Jumbo, a mobile app that lets you control your privacy on the web. I have covered Jumbo several times over the past few years, so it...
French startup Defacto has closed a new securitization fund that will be used to provide short-term loans to small and medium enterprises via an embedded, API-first approach. This is a new fund of ...
PasarPolis, one of Indonesia’s first full-stack insurtechs, has brought on Peter Van Zyl as its president. Van Zyl is former director and CEO of Allianz Indonesia, one of the country’s biggest insu...
Meta acquired 100M users for Threads in just 5 days. You are not Meta, however, which means you’ll need to develop and protect stronger IP.
Startup accelerators are interesting places, but the model of packaging a good idea and firing it at VCs from a demo day cannon is getting diminishing returns. The Sustainable Ocean Alliance (SOA) ...
VC firm Sapphire Ventures says that it plans to invest more than $1 billion in AI-related enterprise startups, demonstrating the strong appetite among investors for cutting-edge AI tech. Reuters re...
The era of tech layoffs is not yet past, but it is losing some of its intensity and changing into a unique trend.
The startup helps companies improve their generative AI prompting, and this quick fundraise indicates there’s room for more of its ilk.
As email becomes an increasingly clogged communication mechanism, businesses looking for more direct ways to communicate with their customers in a B2B context have been turning to Slack, Microsoft ...
After years of working for startups, including Limeade and Zephyr Health, Martin Zych came to realize that companies were lacking an automated, cloud-based way to run their books and prop up their ...
Collective, a platform and advisory team that provides bookkeeping, payroll and tax advice to freelancers, today announced it raised $50 million in a funding round led by Gradient Ventures, Innoviu...
Legal discovery is one of the most time-consuming parts of litigation and typically involves team of specialists combing through towers of documents. Fileread, a startup that uses large language le...
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are an essential part of how many companies do business. But when the number of apps grows beyond a certain threshold, it can be difficult to secure them. Accordin...
Ivy, an API for instant bank payments, has secured €7 million ($7.7 million) in a seed investment round led by European VC Creandum. Payment and transaction fees can accrue because of card networks...
During the pandemic, the digitization of the freight industry took off like a rocket, and stayed that way. To date, Forto has raised almost $600 million, Nuvocargo $75 million, Zencargo $66 million...
This article is for any founder who feels like they’re late for the train — or who’s all aboard, but not going fast enough.
Building and harnessing online communities has been a major driving force behind some of the world’s largest platforms, from Stripe and Slack to Figma and Notion. At the heart of the communit...
Flexport founder Ryan Petersen has joined venture capital firm Founders Fund as a partner, as reported by Forbes earlier today. Founders Fund confirmed the move to TechCrunch, providing the followi...
It takes a small army to produce a world-class tech conference, and we’re searching for a battalion of smart, eager volunteers to lend a hand at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Fr...
Spreadsheets. They’re probably not what you’d call the most exciting piece of software going; it seems like a third of all startup pitches has “spreadsheets” in the “look how ridi...
If your IP is stopping a big company from doing what it wants, that could, in itself, be a good enough reason for acquiring you.
The situation will not resolve over night, but a few more big exits could go a long way to brighten up 2023.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
How far are carnivorous people willing to go to fight climate change and reduce inhumane factory-farming conditions? That’s a huge question when you’re a player in the lab-grown meat industry. How ...
Verifiable integrates APIs with real-time verification technology to help healthcare organizations shorten the time it takes to credential providers from weeks to days.
Dutch e-bike startup VanMoof sped into the mobility world with more than $200 million from a list of big-name investors and an ambitious, trendy spin on two-wheeled electric travel: sleek e-bikes d...
Besides the billions of dollars from local and foreign investors, a strong factor behind Africa’s growing tech ecosystem is its burgeoning talent. Being sought after locally and internationally, th...
It was a short week and that was reflected in the amount of news we covered in fintech land last week. But there was still plenty to talk about, including Clair’s raise, some allegations agai...
Everytable just raised $25 million for its for-profit startup that looks to make healthy food as accessible as fast food.
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday afternoon. I’ve been keeping an eye on the European startup ecosystem since well before I moved to the U.S., and today’...
The individual you’re looking for will create and execute growth strategies, manage marketing initiatives and ultimately, drive revenue.
Here’s a peek under the hood of the pitch deck that Nokod Security used to raise its $8M seed round.
Once an acquisition is in the works, it’s natural for founders to start safeguarding their newfound wealth.
‘People talk about the financing gap, but most of the time, the most important gap is the information gap. You need to inform people.’
Blockchain games want to go mainstream, but the million-dollar question is: What’s the best way to do it?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March, a flurry of startups rushed to step in to help fill a gap in the startup and venture capital community. One of those startups, Mercury, in particular fo...
Google’s venture capital arm Gradient Ventures has made another foray into Europe, investing as part of a $3.2 million seed round in two-year-old German startup Weflow. Weflow is the latest i...
While working at Vetan, a startup helping small- and medium-sized (SMBs) businesses manage employee payroll, Ranti Dev Sharma realized that SMBs often lack the tools to thrive online with organic s...
After reports that it is raising new funding, Indonesian aquaculture startup eFishery announced today that it has netted $200 million in a Series D. The company, which makes a smart feeding system ...
A California Senator is urging the state’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency to conduct an investigation into the business practices of fintech turned HR startup Deel. Last week, Senator Steve...
Here’s what these 15 investors would have done differently in 2023 if they had a crystal ball to divine the future.
As tempting as it may be, you can’t keep a foothold in Silicon Valley while dipping your toe in the Gulf Coast — and still save on taxes.
DigitalOcean, the cloud hosting business, today announced that it’s agreed to acquire Paperspace, a New York-based cloud computing and AI development startup, for $111 million in cash. Digita...
SoftBank is backing Japanese robotics startup Telexistence, making good on the tech giant’s recent pledge to go back on the investment offensive in light of the current AI hype. Tokyo-based T...
New offerings include an on-demand pay solution where users can withdraw funds immediately for the money they’ve earned, but not yet received, and a lending program for employers.
Is there anything I should know about the J-1, particularly if I later decide to stay in the U.S. once the J-1 program ends?
Brinc, the Hong Kong–based accelerator backed by investors like Animoca Brands, is launching a new program for fledgling climate tech startups. The three-month program is tailored for founders who ...
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has become something akin to the default model for software distribution. But it’s more than a business model. It’s also a way of developing and managing software throu...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a single t...
If you’ve tried to get an investor to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) before you pitch them, you’ll often be waved off with something like “We don’t do that.”
Last call for price-savvy TechCrunchers! Our weeklong July 4th sale ends today! We resurrected our early bird for the occasion, and this is your final chance to score serious savings for TechCrunch...
The pandemic has damaged the entire manufacturing supply chain, which is not likely to return to normal until at least 2024 due to a few challenges, including the ongoing U.S.-China tech battle. Ac...
Neko Health, the health tech startup co-founded by Spotify co-creator Daniel Ek, has raised €60 million ($65 million) in its first external round of funding. The Series A round was led by Lakestar,...
Indian online pharmacy startup PharmEasy is planning to raise about $300 million in a new round of funding at a 90% markdown from the previous valuation, two people familiar with the matter said, e...
Dougs, a French accounting startup, has been around since 2015. It already generates $16.4 million (€15 million) in annual recurring revenue. And it’s a bootstrapped company, meaning that it hasn’t...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Charles Baron, the co-founder and CMO at Farmers Business Network (FBN), a startup that of...
If a cat had a thousand lives, we would name it Plaid — in recognition of the fintech startup giant that moves forward relentlessly, regardless of obstacles along the way. Case in point: When the D...
Secret sprawl, where companies store authentication credentials and similar sensitive data across multiple locations, is a real and growing problem for any company wanting to avert a security breac...
Kenyan e-health startup MyDawa has raised $20 million from private equity investor Alta Semper Capital to expand its regional reach and product offerings with the aim of becoming an all-in-one heal...
We interrupt your holiday weekend for this quick reminder. You have only three days left to take advantage of our Fourth of July early-bird price rollback sale. Right now through Wednesday, July 5 ...
The startups that actually make remote work better are focused on communication and collaboration.
M&A and consolidation continue to be major themes in the tech world as companies look for their next steps in a tight market. That’s a trend impacting not just startups and larger tech co...
There will always be a path forward for determined founders with strong ideas and smart investors with an eye for opportunity
As expected, it appears a good mix of investors wrote checks at the rate they’d aimed for, while others fell a bit short.
It was a very busy week in the world of fintech, which certainly kept us on our toes. We covered a couple of notable M&A deals (including one of the biggest of the year so far), a different kin...
While legacy sports betting companies dominate the online market, Miami-based Betr thinks there is room for more players.
Here’s a roundup of this week’s stories and some notable news we weren’t able to cover.
This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how some of the biggest companies in the world have as much — if not more — power than entire countries.
Humane, the startup launched by ex-Apple design and engineering duo Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, today revealed details about its first product: The Humane Ai Pin. It’s been a long t...
We’re publishing on a lighter schedule to commemorate Independence Day, so I’ll return on Friday, July 7 with a new TC+ roundup.
Services like Midjourney and ChatGPT have pushed the boundaries of how AI can create images and text out of basic text prompts. Now, audio appears to be the inevitable next frontier. Music generati...
We’re slightly less than three months away from kicking off TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Francisco. It’s shaping up to be our biggest and best show ever. No hyperbole. Facts ar...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener surve...
It’s hard to choose from all the stuff that works in this deck because the Super.com team really knocked it out of the park.
Fidelity has further slashed the estimated worth of its holding in the social platform Reddit and the chat app Discord as well as SaaS startup Gupshup, giving a preview into how one of the world...
The number of workplaces offering fertility and reproductive healthcare benefits are on the rise. Doing so can help companies become more competitive employers and bolster diversity, equity and inc...
Seoul-based e-commerce company Levit, an operator of the shopping app Alwayz, wants to make the shopping experience more entertaining and affordable. The two-year-old startup has recently raised $4...
TechCrunch+ recently asked VCs how the first half of 2023 bore out for their investments and how their portcos are handling a cash-light environment.
Fund of funds are designed to give funds access. Newer FoF strategies can help LPs get access to emerging managers.
Pokémon GO maker Niantic laid off 230 employees today, just one year after it laid off around 90 employees. During last year’s layoffs, Niantic canceled four projects, including a Transformer...
It’s a big day for generative AI funding. On the heels of Inflection AI landing a $1.3 billion investment, Runway, a startup building generative AI tools for multimedia content creators, toda...
In our tech-driven world, the right to privacy — once the cornerstone of democracy — is disappearing at an alarming rate. But not everyone is keen on having Big Tech companies and nation-states sur...
As the race to build generative AI tools for the enterprise devolves into a battle royale, big tech is busy wielding its most powerful weapon: checkbooks.
Just about every developer wants to create APIs to help other companies connect to their services more easily, but creating and documenting an API is a time-consuming process. Speakeasy, an early-s...
In 2023, funds of funds (FoFs) are on track to raise the smallest amount of money in more than a decade. At the same time, muted venture deal activity has many firms ditching their follow-on funds....
The Naked Market is relaunching Haus favorites, including Citrus Flower, Pomegranate Rosemary and Grapefruit Jalapeño.
Halo.Car, a startup that uses remote operators to deliver rental cars to a customer’s door, has launched driverless operations in Las Vegas. Driverless operations mean something different for...
If you read enough startup coverage, you’ve noticed that no matter the part of the economy that an upstart tech company is attacking, there’s a pretty darn good chance that it is doing ...
Fintech startup Shares has raised $90 million for its stock trading app. And yet, the service is only available to people who live in the U.K. But that’s about to change as the company has received...
Cyware, a startup developing products to help enterprises modernize their security operations, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by Ten Eleven Ventures. Adv...
B Garage, a San Jose-based startup building autonomous drones along with software to track warehouse inventory, said today that it has picked up $20 million in a Series A round of funding. New inv...
In the industrial world, cement is about as omnipresent as materials get. But despite its clear and obvious utility, cement is responsible for some 8% of global CO2 emissions — if it was a co...
In 2022, Abhay Parasnis, the former CTO of Adobe, founded Typeface, a generative AI startup focused on enterprise use cases. With it, he hoped to leverage generative AI — which at the time wa...
Credit card giant Visa is acquiring Brazilian payments infrastructure startup Pismo for $1 billion in cash in what is likely one of the largest fintech M&A deals taking place this year so far. ...
David Lazovsky and Preet Virk, technologists with backgrounds in semiconductor engineering and photonics, came to the joint realization several years ago that AI and machine learning workloads woul...
There are very few ways to raise nine figures of equity capital.
Here in the States, we’re celebrating the start of a great summer by traveling back in time. Back to the days of early-bird prices on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, which takes place on Septemb...
The accelerator is seeking new capital ahead of the end of the deployment period of its third institutionally-backed fund, Techstars Accelerator 2021, late this year.
OpenAI is expanding overseas. To London, specifically. Today, the Microsoft-backed AI startup announced that it plans to open an office in London, its first international outpost. When OpenAI’...
Robotic process automation (RPA) has been a buzzword for a while now, but most of the tools that try to help businesses automate their workflows tend to be generalists. Quandri, a Vancouver, Canada...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener surve...
The Equitable Access Fund will be deployed over the next five years with aims to improve equitable access to credit and unlock up to $1 billion in credit for small business owners.
There are many fintech companies offering digital banking services to a variety of demographics, but one segment of the population has been underserved more than others: the undocumented immigrant....
Parabola, a San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to help expedite back-office processes, particularly in the logistics and e-commerce sectors, today announced that it raised $24 million in a Se...
Startups have been looking for ways to disrupt event streaming, popularized in the last decade by Kafka, the open source event streaming platform. Just this week we looked at Redpanda getting a $10...
A new company is emerging out of stealth today with $35 million in funding and a plan to acquire and consolidate startups within the Salesforce ecosystem. Unaric, as the company is called, has secu...
Astrix Security, a platform that helps companies manage and secure third-party app integrations, today announced that it closed a $25 million Series A funding round led by CRV with participation fr...
Fairphone CEO Eva Gouwens has announced that she’s stepping down, some five years after landing in the hotseat. Founded out of the Netherlands back in 2010, Fairphone has set out to different...
Over the last year and a half or so, we helped several team members relocate from Ukraine and Russia. How do we bring them here?
Bluu Seafood, a German company creating cultivated (i.e. “lab-grown”) fish products, today announced it has raised €16 million ($17.5 million) in a Series A round of funding. Founded ou...
Meet Flowie, a new French startup that wants to facilitate money movements between companies. The company centralizes everything related to accounts receivable and accounts payable so that everyone...
Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are all the rage these days, owing to their unparalleled ability to analyze and generate text. But for organizations looking to leverage LLMs ...
Building a durable growth funnel doesn’t just scale your business: it also signals to investors that a team can move directionally, which is a major confidence builder.
I know that regulation lags the market, but holy hell, what was all this?
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by the founders of Spout, a startup that makes a device that can pull fresh drinking water ou...
If you own a home, you know that there is always something that needs to be repaired, installed or generally addressed. Whether it’s a leaky faucet, a new bed that needs to be assembled or a Nest t...
Gusto, best known for its American payroll management software and services, is playing in the big leagues.
TechCrunch+ surveyed four active VCs about their views on the ecosystem for ML startups, an underexplored subfield of AI.
Prosus, the largest non-founder shareholder in Byju’s, has drastically slashed the worth of its stake in the edtech giant, implying a starkly diminished valuation of $5.1 billion to the India...
Joyful Ventures is a new venture fund looking for alternative protein startups that are disrupting a 100-year-old food system.
Fund III more than doubles Unshackled Ventures’ assets under management with some proceeds going toward a founder-in-residence program.
Several years ago, Noah Stanford teamed up with Michael Melone to found 0pass, a startup that aims to make it easier for companies to replace usernames and passwords with biometrics, like Touch ID ...
A trend accelerated by the mass move to digital during the pandemic, enterprises are having to handle an increasing amount of proprietary data. According to one survey, the average company deals wi...
Socure, the identity verification service that raised a massive $450 million Series E round at a $4.5 billion valuation during the heady fundraising days of late 2021 (and $100 million earlier in 2...
While running a 5,000-agent contact center, Brian Tuite often experienced the problem of having to train new agents on the basics. The way he tells it, they weren’t prepared for success ̵...
Redpanda helps companies capture data in real time in a modern context, providing a new way to stream data while maintaining backwards compatibility with Kafka, the popular open source streaming pr...
Companies are increasingly embracing generative AI. But they’re not necessarily considering all the blockers and challenges that come along with folding the tech into their existing workflows...
Three years ago, Vitaly Gordon, one of the founding members of Salesforce’s Einstein research division, started Faros AI, a platform for software engineers designed to bring key operational d...
Kenyan fashion e-commerce startup ShopZetu is set to add beauty and home décor categories to its portfolio, in response to the growing needs of the young and style-conscious women in Africa. This i...
Dexory, a company that serves warehouses with real-time inventory management data using AI software and autonomous robots, has raised $19 million in a Series A round of funding led by European VC A...
About 400 million tons of plastic are produced each year, but less than 10% is recycled, with most of the rest ending up incinerated or in landfills. One reason is that it is difficult for conventi...
Large brand distributors dominate the top of the supply chain, but toward the bottom, there are thousands of middlemen, including wholesalers, who are the ones creating relationships with retailers...
Ironically, the social app IRL‘s users do not exist in real life. An internal investigation by IRL’s board of directors found that 95% of the app’s reported 20 million users were ...
When you run big real-life industrial operations, there’s always a gauge or readout somewhere deep in the facility that your engineers or field teams need to check in person. Lilz is a Japane...
By identifying your ideal customer personas first, you will find product-market fit faster and identify the right customers to sell to.
The gist is that the prevailing pessimism in the air is wearing down these once-key pillars of venture volume.
ThoughtSpot, an AI-powered analytics platform last valued at $4.5 billion, today announced that it’s entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mode Analytics, a business intelligence sta...
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. Finance automation company Ramp has acquired Cohere.io, a startup that built an AI-powered customer support tool, the companies told TechCrunch e...
What does it take to turn an unknown startup into a household name? The ability to scale. It’s the Holy Grail that every early-stage startup founder chases. Scaling internal operations may lack the...
The success of large language models like GPT has sparked a frenzy of developers eager to make AI-powered applications. But building AI services can be tricky, especially due to the shortage of ski...
Frst, the Paris-based VC firm with no vowel in its name, is in the process of raising its second fund. The firm has already reached a first closing of €72 million (nearly $80 million at today’s exc...
utu, a travel tech company that helps flyers get more out of their tax-free shopping, announced today it has raised a $33 million Series B from investors, including SC Ventures. utu also announced ...
Buyers and sellers are coming to a consensus on startup valuations which is the first step to jump starting the late-stage market.
Welcome back to The Interchange! If you want this in your inbox, sign up here. We’re back after a brief hiatus, with lots of fintech news, including Robinhood’s latest acquisition, Plai...
The start of a new season is always a good time to revisit past predictions and look for new topics to track. Today, dry powder and university spinouts.
Caraway, which looks to provide supplemental telehealth services to Gen Z, has raised a $16.75 million Series A round.
With regulators looking closely, it’s not a stretch to wonder if the deal will ever happen. But if it does, would the deal be a net-positive for Figma?
Welcome to Startups Weekly. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday afternoon. This week, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence. One of the m...
Thousands of startups have experimented with infinite variations and tweaks to their growth funnel. Why try to reinvent the same foundation?
Most founders don’t know they’re on the wrong track until it’s too late. Building a startup requires a high degree of confidence — and for some, denial.
If you’re a student hell-bent on making your mark in the startup world, then you must go to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco. Even better for budget-strapped s...
Prosus, Peak XV Partners and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative confirmed Friday that their representatives have resigned from the board of Byju’s, India’s most valuable startup that is also re...
This week on The TechCrunch Podcast, I’m stepping in for the podcast’s usual host Darrell, and taking a closer look at what’s happening at Reddit. The popular social media company...
While VCs, founders and major tech companies compete to see who can say “AI” the most in a week, people are busy building other, more useful stuff.
After spending more than a decade in the customer experience industry, three friends, Jaime Scott, Michelle Dinsmore and Alex Richards, decided to launch their own company, EvaluAgent, to develop q...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Mary Ann and Alex are back, and once again they tapped the ...
Whither, Skully? The Indiegogo darling of a smart helmet company made all sorts of promises in 2014 and even shipped a few lids to early backers before getting lost on the way to market and disappe...
On-demand startups in Asia raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors over the last several years to scale and compete heavily in ridesharing, alternative transport, delivery and a super...
India’s corporate affairs ministry ordered an investigation into edtech startup Byju’s last week, television news channel CNBC-TV18 reported Friday, further complicating matters at the ...
Lithuania is vying to become one of the major European tech hubs, bolstered by a growing number of so-called “unicorn” startups and governmental efforts to attract a high-profile accele...
Inflection, a well-funded AI startup aiming to create “personal AI for everyone,” has taken the wraps off the large language model powering its Pi conversational agent. It’s hard ...
If everything seems to be going well, but you’re not getting any traction, it’s probably because you’ve run into one of these three problems.
Amazon, keen to avoid being left behind in the hyper-competitive AI race, is launching a new program to bolster customers and partners focused on generative AI. Called the AWS Generative AI Innovat...
Kibsi is an Irvine, California-based startup that is building a no-code computer vision platform that allows businesses to build and deploy computer vision applications. Among the things that set K...
The combination of seller pessimism and modest buyer optimism has seemingly done the trick to boost secondary market activity.
Robinhood announced on Thursday that it was acquiring X1, a no-fee credit card startup, for $95 million in cash. X1, which offers an income-based credit card with rewards, raised a total of $62 mil...
Fintech startup Plaid got its start as a company that connects consumer bank accounts to financial applications, but has since been gradually expanding its offerings.
Omeat’s process uses regenerative factors extracted humanely from cow plasma to make growth media to create beef, pork, chicken or fish.
With the explosion of different kinds of data, companies are struggling to realize meaningful value from their stored data. Data teams are overworked — forced to cater to the needs of dispara...
In the past year, Heard saw both its therapist customer base and revenue grow by five times. The new funding will be used for technology development and rounding out its leadership team.
FLOWN is a startup that took the idea of “virtual co-working” some of us did during the pandemic and created a model of guided “deep work” sessions with actual coaches. Billing itself a...
Genies, the Bob Iger-backed avatar tech company, announced Thursday the launch of its Developer Engagement Fund to reward developers that build AR experiences via Genies’ recently announced develop...
Global giant Deloitte quit as the auditor of Byju’s and three board members resigned from the most valuable Indian startup on Thursday, sending a shockwave through the industry, a year after ...
Bridge 2 Technologies began with the notion that it should be easier for companies to find a diverse set of vendors. The company formed three years ago with the idea of bringing these two groups to...
The amount of plastic waste produced globally is on track to triple to over 1,000 million tons by 2060. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report predicts that develo...
There is an estimated 3 million software engineers in Europe, depending on what report you want to believe, but finding the right engineers for the job at hand isn’t all that straightforward....
Supercritical, the carbon removal marketplace aimed (at the moment) mainly at tech companies that want to hit “net zero,” has raised a $13 million Series A funding round, led by Lightsp...
U.S. regulators approved both Upside Foods and Good Meat to sell their cultivated chicken products within the country.
Do I need to get two separate visas to work at two companies at the same time? Can I transfer my H-1B to one or both companies?
In a press release sent to AFP, Getir has announced that it plans to exit France. As a reminder, Getir pioneered the concept of quick commerce. Those services allow you to order groceries without p...
A little more growth and help from rising multiples and Databricks could go public safely, especially if it targets a $31 billion market cap.
Although the focus of the fund is not just to solely back women, it hopes to focus its efforts there when possible.
Commercial and defense organizations have an Earth data overload problem: They collect vast amounts of heavily siloed data, with few ways to quickly synthesize insights and deliver them to the peop...
In late 2022, BetterBrand found success on Whole Foods Market shelves, driving over $1 million in gross sales in the first five months.
Notarize, the world’s largest online notary network, is launching Proof, a new company and platform for digital identity verifications. Beginning in August, Notarize’s business tools will be rebran...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Web Sun, the co-founder and president of Komodo Health, a startup that uses data to create...
When you think about it, other than Airbnb, there really hasn’t been a major shift in how we plan and book travel online in decades.
Talk about a slam dunk. Shaquille O’Neal, 15-time NBA All-Star, four-time NBA Champion and three-time NBA Finals MVP, will join us at TC Disrupt 2023, which takes place September 19-21. Following n...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener surv...
Cloud platform startup Render closed a $50 million series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Additional participation in the round includes General Catalyst, South Park Common Fund, and Addi...
Jane Technologies today announced the launch of its new point-of-sale (POS) platform that it says will improve the overall cannabis shopping experience with reliable online listings and in-store cu...
We all know what authentication is. You enter a username and password or use your face or your fingerprint, and you can access a device or an application, but what you can do with that application ...
Clivi is making a balance between humans and technology by connecting patients with doctors and enabling them to access monitoring and treatment plans via their communication channel of choice....
Artificial intelligence touches many aspects of professional industries, including medicine, legal, business, information technology and more. AI-powered transcription service is one example that h...
Meet Hyperline, a new product that handles pricing and billing for software-as-a-service companies. The company provides integrations so that you can quickly start billing. It then supports differe...
Go-Ventures, backed by Indonesia’s GoTo, announced Tuesday it has raised a second fund at $240 million and rebranded as Argor Capital “to reinforce the investment firm’s independe...
Meet Gladia, a French AI startup that wants to change how companies interact with audio data. The company develops an audio transcription application programming interface (API) that you can integr...
Shoppable Business wants to make it easier for businesses in the Philippines to source and procure branded products and other inventory, with an emphasis on making sure products are authentic. The ...
Byju’s is cutting 500 to 1,000 more jobs at the firm, this time eliminating several non-sales roles as well, as the Indian edtech giant pushes to improve its finances, according to a person f...
Yellow, an asset financier for solar energy and digital devices in Africa, has raised $14 million series B funding in a round led by Convergence Partners with participation from the Energy Entrepre...
Seedstars Capital and Swiss philanthropic foundation Fondation Botnar have launched Seedstars Youth Wellbeing Ventures, a $20 million investment vehicle targeting early-stage startups in Africa tha...
Not dead yet: This is true both of the U.K’s capacity to attract venture capital dollars, and of the promise of autonomous cars.
While many venture debt lenders were skeptical the strategy would work for asset managers, BlackRock decided to take the plunge.
The event horizon for when we can expect to end up in (literal) hot water when it comes to climate has come a lot closer. You wanna know how close? The climate deadline is close enough that it is i...
If you don’t drink, navigating nightlife, bars and even eating out can be an exercise in frustration. Non-alcoholic options are popping up everywhere, but for every neighborhood haunt with a booze-...
U.K.-based Revolut saw its valuation being reduced earlier this year, and the company is once again in the headlines for reasons that it won’t like.
Public SaaS companies reaching their highest valuations of 2023 reminds me of an old song: “I’ve been down so long, it looks like up to me.”
There’s an all-out race to leverage AI to add more utility and value to products, and to reap a portion of the resulting demand in AI-powered products and services.
The result of an opaque funding environment is that a lot happens in secrecy. Founders keep their heads down, and people move in silence, especially people of color.
Netmaker submitted its pitch deck to TechCrunch+, and today we’re taking a close look at the deck the company used to raise its $2.3 million round.
Smaller funds raising less institutional capital gives them more leverage to take risks, which is what investing in diversity is seen as.
The hype around AI will produce a lot of startups built on shaky ethics. But founders already building in the space can offer some advice.
The event horizon for when we can expect to end up in (literal) hot water when it comes to climate has come a lot closer.
When someone is very ill or has had surgery that interrupts ordinary ways of eating and drinking, tube feeding is a life-saving necessity, but it’s cumbersome and uncomfortable to use. Lumino...
Nue Life Health is a U.S.-based telemedicine startup that combines psychedelic-assisted therapies and a health tracking app. Previously, the app was only offered as part of its own internal service...
Founded by Google AdMob and Yahoo alums, Glystn is a tool for content creators that allows them to engage with followers, gather insights and read/answer comments from multiple social media platfor...
While the U.K. and U.S. try to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision over concerns it will kill competition in games distribution, competition appears to be alive and well in another (s...
According to a new study from Sista and the Boston Consulting Group, women are still underrepresented in the European tech ecosystem. Only 22% of startups created in 2022 included a woman on the fo...
As companies increasingly rely on machine learning models, it’s imperative that they continuously check the models to make sure they are working as intended and that the data is valid, unbiased and...
ChrysCapital has invested $100 million in Lenskart, the two said Thursday, pushing the Asian eyewear startup’s raise in the past year to $850 million as it expands its offerings and reach in ...
Approximately how much time and money will we need to set aside for the H1-B transfer process? Are there alternatives?
Once the pandemic normalized virtual meetups, the concept of “personalized AI” began to gain steam. Startups creating “AI-driven” avatars — realistic-looking character...
Startups are hardly out of the woods, but the market is no longer moving away from their valuation marks.
Majority’s new location positions the company close to The Gateway to the Americas International Bridge that crosses the Rio Grande in Texas.
Started as a side project, JDoodle, which lets developers practice more than six dozen programming languages on one website, hit 800,000 users while being bootstrapped. Now the Australia-based star...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Amy Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Authenticx, a Midwestern startup that helps insurance...
Truework, an income and employment verification platform used by banks, lenders, property managers and employers, today announced a strategic partnership and $24 million in equity funding from cons...
Generative AI has undoubtedly been the big buzzword of the past year, driven in large part by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT. But while the ability to create all manner of fresh content from a...
Founded in Melbourne, One Future Football (1FF) bills itself as the “world’s first global soccer league,” and it’s goal is to attract first-time soccer fans. It launches today with more than 250 CG...
The Philippines’ startup ecosystem is poised for strong growth, thanks to the country’s rising GDP, fast adoption of online services and a new generation of founders. Launched by tech and investmen...
Finfra, an Indonesian startup that provides the tech infrastructure for online businesses that want to offer embedded finance products, has raised $1 million in new funding. The round included part...
Tech is not a meritocracy: There’s a direct correlation between the size and strength of your network and your chances of success.
Given Turo’s slightly lower Q1 results, we doubt it will be racing out the door, ready to change the tenor of the IPO conversation anytime soon.
Space is a tough place for electronic circuits since radiation causes short circuits that result in mission failure, said Hwai Lin Khor, vice president of Zero-Error Systems. Many companies current...
The startup is betting that direct air capture can be profitable by starting with niche markets.
Pollen is a new professional membership for those who have, or want, independent careers.
Tech is not a meritocracy. There’s a direct correlation between the size and strength of your network and your chances of success.
Nordic VC firm Voima Ventures today announced its third fund with an initial closing of €90 million and a final target of €120 million, focusing on early-stage “deep tech” startups from...
Indifi Technologies, an Indian startup offering digital lending to small and medium businesses, has raised $35 million in a new funding round led by ICICI Venture, the investment arm of ICICI Bank....
Many Black founders in the U.K. are overmentored yet underfunded. This firm cuts straight to the chase by writing checks.
How can you find PMF in the most efficient and frictionless way possible? I argue that the answer to this question is paid acquisition.
To get the pulse of what’s germinating in this fast rising industry, TechCrunch+ surveyed five alternative protein investors, and they had a lot to say on the subject.
Oova’s new membership offering is priced at $99 and includes The Oova Kit, personalized support from healthcare professionals and access to a community of peers.
Showing it’s playing for keeps in the generative AI race, Salesforce today announced that it’s growing its Generative AI Fund, the part of the company’s Salesforce Ventures VC off...
Want more fintech news in your inbox? Sign up here. In recent years, a number of startups have made a business out of providing corporate credit cards to companies. These players compete not only w...
Acquired by HSBC in an emergency sale for just £1 in March as SVB was melting down, SVB UK is now getting a rebrand and expansion under its new owner. Today the banking giant launched HSBC Innovati...
Meet Djust, a French startup that essentially wants to build an e-commerce platform like Mirakl, but focused exclusively on business-to-business (B2B) activities. The company recently raised a $13 ...
Don’t worry, the answer here is not just “build an AI startup.”
Welcome back to The Interchange! If you want this in your inbox, sign up here. We’ll be taking a break next weekend as Mary Ann and Christine both take much-needed vacations (we didn’t ...
In the era of quick judgments, it’s tempting to think we are more clever than anyone else. But from AI to Apple to senior tech, underestimating others comes at a risk: being seriously wrong.
As a startup founder, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could predict the future a little bit more than you currently do? It turns out you can: By paying close attention to what the behemoths in your s...
Network-focused startups have started getting a bad rep in startup land, but 2045 is actually bringing something new to the table.
If you’re adventurous with your food, or just like to keep up with the fast-moving foodtech industry, here’s a roundup of this week’s stories and some notable news we weren’t able to cover.
Consolidation continues apace in the world of fintech. FIS, the fintech giant that runs a wide range of payment, banking and investment services, has acquired Bond, a startup that specializes in em...
Will the Apple Vision Pro create new opportunities in spatial computing? Jump-starting demand for a new product is hard. Unless you’re Apple.
If you look past the headlines about the money and hype around generative AI, what are today’s AI startups building?
Chronosphere aims to provide engineers with actionable insights derived from the company’s data. According to the company, this leads to lower spend and provides a better return on investment. Join...
As a startup, it’s your job to explain to an investor that you’re on the right path. This deck doesn’t do that.
In what could be the understatement of the year, 2023 has not been kind to tech workers. Tens of thousands have been laid off, and while we can’t do much to change that reality, there is something ...
Online merchants upload their product catalog to nocnoc’s platform and can start selling instantly on some of Latin America’s top marketplaces.
In a recent panel interview with Collider, Joe Russo, the director of tentpole Marvel films like “Avengers: Endgame,” predicted that within two years, AI will be able to create a fully ...
U.K.-based cultivated meat startup Higher Steaks has raised $30 million in a Series A round of funding and revealed that it’s changing its name to Uncommon. Founded out of Cambridge in 2017, ...
In a sign that there’s plenty of cash to go around for generative AI startups, Cohere, which is developing an AI model ecosystem for the enterprise, today announced that it raised $270 millio...
Next year we might expect anywhere between 30 and 35 new climate tech companies to emerge.
Samsara, which went public in late 2021, recently proved that it is still possible to expand fast and hold on to value.
Co-founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn launched Cloudflare to the world during the Startup Battlefield competition at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2010. Fast-forward 13 years, and the startup...
Millions of personal injury cases are settled in the U.S. every year, as few go to trial — but the vast majority are kept under wraps. This leaves lawyers guessing what they should propose as...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday (Thursday, this week) show where we ni...
Green Coffee is a consolidated arabica coffee farming company, headquartered in the U.S., with operations in Colombia that span 9,000 acres across 14 farms.
Paris-based startup Pigment has raised a Series C round of $88 million — the investment was led by Iconiq Growth. Pigment wants to take on Microsoft Excel and offer a business planning platform tha...
Amsterdam-based insurtech startup Insify has completed its Series A funding round with another €10 million ($10.7 million at today’s exchange rate). Overall, the startup has raised €25 million as p...
Julie Wainwright, founder and former CEO of the publicly traded, luxury online consignment company The RealReal, is back with a new startup. Called Ahara, the Los Angeles-based outfit describes its...
Digibee, a low-code integration platform geared toward enterprise organizations, today announced that it raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from...
The muted late-stage funding and exit environments have left investors with few data points and examples of how to price companies.
Atlanta’s venture scene is growing. To give you a look at the market’s strengths and areas of improvement, TechCrunch caught up with two local VCs as part of TechCrunch’s virtual ...
The OKR framework has helped countless startups synchronize their teams and realize ambitious goals, launching their companies to new heights.
TechCrunch sat down with investor and entrepreneur Rodney Sampson as part of a fireside chat for our TechCrunch Atlanta Live program. The topic at hand was his work with the Atlanta-based ecosystem...
Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens sat down with TechCrunch to help open our first TechCrunch Live event dedicated to the city and spoke with us about the rapidly growing tech landscape. Atlanta is home t...
Can’t the Department of State/USCIS track the interfiled applications between EB-2 and EB-3 and move the dates accordingly?
Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-4 are powerful, paradigm-shifting tools that promise to upend industries. But they suffer from limitations that make them less attractive to ent...
Cava’s multi-billion-dollar IPO valuation could be the kick in the pants that companies need to start going public again.
TechCrunch Live is excited to host a special, extended episode focused on the great city of Atlanta, Georgia. The show kicks off today at 2:30pm EDT, and concludes at 4:30pm EDT following a pitch-o...
Here’s how it works: business owners receive growth capital in exchange for a percentage of their business’ revenue, which is paid back in accordance with how fast or slow revenue is accumulated.
Typical financial planning and analysis teams spend the bulk of their time on data-gathering and administering processes. That’s because they often have to deal with cumbersome systems and so...
With the new fund, Positive Ventures intends to invest in between 20 and 25 companies at the pre-seed and seed levels.
GetHarley, a platform that connects consumers with skincare clinicians and related products, has raised $52 million in a round of funding led by existing investor Index Ventures. Founded out of Lon...
Apple has acquired Mira, an augmented reality (AR) headset startup, for an undisclosed amount, according to The Verge. Founded by entrepreneur Ben Taft in 2016 and based in Los Angeles, Mira has be...
Instabase, a startup providing an apps platform that can be used to understand and analyze “unstructured” data, today announced that it raised $45 million in a Series C round led by Tri...
Whether you’re pursuing customer number five, 50 or 500, the process of determining if there’s a fit remains largely the same.
One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to UX is that we must eliminate as many questions and barriers as possible.
Founders need to know whether the people they’re getting into business with understand how to operate during a downturn.
Spanish startup Life5 has raised its third funding round and has been growing nicely since my previous post. The company also has a new name — it used to be called Getlife. In addition to its home ...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Eli Ben-Joseph, the co-founder and CEO of Regard, a startup that uses AI to streamline the...
TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship startup event, returns to San Francisco on September 19–21, and you can bet TechCrunch+ will be in the house. It’s going to be the biggest and best Disrupt we...
Meeting the needs, practical and emotional, of the queer, trans and nonbinary community is both sensitive and pressing. This is something that For Them, a genderqueer wellness company founded by Ky...
The core technology is a proprietary ledger capable of processing more than 50 million transactions per second and a network of interconnected real-time payment rails.
In 2018, Matt Lafferty and Brian Gonzalez co-founded Curri, a tech platform focused on last-mile logistics for the construction industry. Their goal, they say, was to help customers, specifically d...
Config is the software that founder James Proud wishes he had at his last startup Hello, maker of sleep tracker Sense. “Config would have been a lifesaver for us at Hello and had a massive positive...
This Wednesday TechCrunch Live is taking a virtual trip to the great city of Atlanta. You can tag along by registering HERE. The show starts on Wednesday, June 7, 2023 at 2:00 pm EDT. It’s fr...
BOND’s founders say their approach to livestream shopping is creator and content first so that the “creator in the driver’s seat and at the forefront of the experience.”
OurX has seven products currently for tightly textured hair, and the average regimen of products offered is between $115 and $130.
While cloud computing has transformed just about every industry on Earth, a burgeoning backlash has led some businesses to seek alternatives to the Big Tech-dominated public cloud. Vendor lock-in, ...
French startup Escape has raised a $3.9 million (€3.6 million) funding round shortly after ending Y Combinator’s winter 2023 cohort. The company provides a cybersecurity product focused on securing...
Remotely monitoring customers without violating their privacy is a challenging task. But one co-founder believes that she’s cracked the code. On a recent episode of TechCrunch Live, TC’s week...
The Fed’s initiative has opened up a window for innovation, the effects of which could be realized as early as next year.
While it might seem daunting to question potential investors, remember that you need to build a mutual zone of trust for the long journey.
Thinking of Japan often evokes notions of bleeding-edge tech mixed with deep tradition and culture. The country’s startups, however, haven’t seen the sort of growth that upstart tech companies in o...
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday ...
A recent survey of founders indicates that even as startups take a closer look at their cloud spending, growth is still a priority.
Welcome back to The Interchange! If you want this in your inbox, sign up here. While there is always a lot going on in the world of fintech, this week felt a little subdued overall — at least when ...
Hey, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the week in tech. Hope the summer’s treating y’all well — it’s a balmy 90 degr...
Exploring how one VC is feeling about a big chunk of her portfolio pivot into AI, and some updates on internal developer portals.
Hangovers suck. Especially so for those who felt pressured to drink the alcohol that inevitably caused the hangover to begin with. Drinking is slowly starting to fall out of fad, especially among y...
At the Series A stage, VCs want to know that they can pump money into a product that will start going into the market.
The collapse of SVB does bring new opportunities for venture debt lenders, but they aren’t interested in SVB’s early-stage strategy.
When no one worried about IT spending, startups leaned into the bottom-up sales approach and driving PLG. But that was then, and this is now.
Dumme, a startup putting AI to practical use in video editing, is already generating demand before opening up to the public. The Y Combinator-backed company has hundreds of video creators testing i...
From an initial read of data from the past month, we can infer that the current crypto winter is far from thawing.
Here’s a new and, dare we say, awesome opportunity for your company to join forces with TechCrunch at Disrupt 2023. Yes, we dare! Announcing After Hours events! Host an After Hours event at TechCru...
Here’s a deep dive into the slide deck that Oii.ai used to raise its $1.8 million seed round, highlighting what it got right and what it didn’t.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Mary Ann and...
Proptech firm Aurum is acquiring NestAway, a once high-flying Indian startup operating in the same space, for up to $10.9 million, in a deal that marks a near complete erosion in value for the star...
Fidelity, the lead investor in Reddit’s most recent funding round in 2021, has slashed the estimated worth of its equity stake in the popular social media platform by 41% since the investment...
Stripe wants to make it easier for businesses to access credit. The private financial infrastructure giant announced a new charge card program today from Stripe Issuing, its commercial card issuing...
This Chilean startup used the side door to break into the mining industry, which is slow to adopt new technologies.
While their work is the backbone of many startups, many scientists don’t become founders. Perhaps its time they should.
Working in customer support often means navigating disjointed tools to find data and solve issues. However, many of these actions are routine and repeatable, making them ideal candidates for automa...
Nearly every tech company seems to be working on AI tooling, and everyone is at least talking about using it. But how the heck are companies going to charge for it?
There are many companies out there looking at how to reduce your cloud bills by eliminating waste, or finding more cost-effective ways of doing the same job. Xonai, an early-stage startup, is takin...
Chamberlain Coffee announced it is entering the ready-to-drink space with a line of cold brew lattes and adding a national retail presence in Sprouts and Walmart.
Platformatic, a new back-end development platform, wants to make it easier for enterprises to modernize their infrastructure by giving them the tools to build and deploy microservices-based archite...
As companies look to update their databases, especially in a cloud-native context, with so many different databases out there, it’s a huge challenge for developers when migrating from one environme...
It is estimated that less than 1% of all VC dollars are raised by companies with founders openly within the LGBTQ+ community.
Vault, an online banking platform serving small-to-medium sized business (SMBs) in Canada, is launching to the public today after raising $3.7 million in seed funding. Founded in late 2021 by Saud ...
The full-stack insurance carrier is targeting Latin America’s growing middle class that may have previously been unable to obtain financial protection.
SaaS companies should be solving for simplicity and adoption in their AI feature pricing. This is a time for learning and iteration.
Measurabl, a startup developing a platform for environmental, social and governance (ESG) data in the real estate space, today announced that it raised $93 million in a Series D funding tranche co-...
Capillary Technologies, an Indian SaaS startup that offers solutions for loyalty management and customer engagement, has raised $45 million in a funding round, as it plans to expand into global mar...
Photonic computing startup Lightmatter is taking its big shot at the rapidly growing AI computation market with a hardware-software combo it claims will help the industry level up — and save a lot ...
Since assuming office last year, Dickens has developed a reputation for his robust support of technology.
Buying a SIEM is a massive commitment: You and your organization will need to live with your decision for years to come.
Decarbonizing industrial heat isn’t easy, but a startup thinks it can harness the power of the sun to make it happen.
Cortex, a startup building an internal developer portal that helps engineering teams build better software at scale, today announced a $35 million Series B funding round led by IVP. Craft Ventures,...
Fintech giant Stripe has acquired Okay, a startup that developed a low-code analytics software to help engineering leaders better understand how their teams are performing, the companies told TechC...
Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to au...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single...
The IPCC has said the world needs to remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by 2050 in order to avoid a climate cataclysm. And, yes, there are multiple methods for carbon re...
Blink CEO Gil Barak says there have been three distinct periods when it comes to security operations automation. The first required experts to code workflows, taking weeks or months to produce a si...
From Foursquare to Zenly, there hasn’t exactly been a shortage of location-centric social networks outside the usual Big Tech ecosystems, but for one reason or another things have never reall...
Those familiar with Faizan Buzdar, who was until recently the VP of product management at Box, likely associate the entrepreneur with Convo, the digital workspace platform popular among newsrooms (...
Today’s the day, startup founders. It’s your final opportunity to join Startup Battlefield 200, the world’s preeminent startup competition, at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. It’s your last chance...
Selva Ventures will deploy its second fund into consumer brands that promote healthier living in the areas of health, wellness, beauty and personal care.
Strive Health works with local providers to form an integrated care delivery system that follows a patient from chronic kidney disease to end-stage kidney disease.
To qualify for a EB-1A green card, I’ll need to travel internationally frequently for business. Once I apply, will I be stuck in the U.S.?
Taxfix leaped to a $1 billion valuation in 2022 on the back of a popular mobile app used by consumers to help with tax returns. But fast-forward to 2023, and the Berlin-based accounting startup is ...
Today’s PLG needs to inform both the product and sales teams so they can work smoothly together and clinch the next deal.
TechCrunch Disrupt, a veritable who’s who and what’s what in the startup world, takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco. It’s the perfect destination to find inspiration, gain knowledge, fo...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week, Becca and Dom are joined by Stacy Blain, the co-founder and chief science officer at Concarlo Therapeutics. Blain tal...
HackCapital helps founders, fund managers and syndicates in the climate tech and foodtech industries tap into its network to raise capital.
Pluton Biosciences is hard at work identifying beneficial microorganisms and putting them to work in agriculture, and just raised a $16.5 million Series A round to commercialize its most promising ...
In the same way that we now take pictures of receipts to expense that “important lunch,” construction tech startup Qflow allows the teams running construction sites to do the same for b...
Klarna managed to nab market share in a contracting market, keeping its own growth story afloat despite stiff headwinds.
For more than seven years, UpCodes has been making the complicated world of building codes easier to understand for people like industry professionals and homeowners. Its platform includes a search...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday Tuesday show covers the latest in tech news fro...
Holy procrastination, startup founders! Tomorrow’s your last chance to apply to the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Your last chance for a shot to stand on the Disrupt Stage and...
Wellplaece’s takes in a client’s ordering data and then enables the customer to make those specific purchasing behaviors across a large network of suppliers via one shopping cart.
BlackRock, a minority investor in Byju’s, has yet again cut the valuation of its holding in the Bengaluru-based startup, this time to about $8.4 billion, even as the most valuable Indian star...
Carrum Health CEO Sach Jain noted that 2022 “was a big year for us” that included nearly doubling its book of business.
From 2021 to 2022, overall deal count in the Northeast was down around 25%. It might not be surprising, but it is quite stark.
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive i...
Startups and active investors are uniquely positioned to support the defense efforts of the West and the mission to keep our societies safe.
From cybersecurity to SaaS for restaurants, the key to running a successful business is selling a product that solves your clients’ real problems.
Welcome to this week’s edition of Startups Weekly.
To run 60-minute startup board meetings that create value, replace your 80-slide deck with a simple three-page memo.
While Chegg beat analyst expectations for the first quarter of the year, it also raised a warning that didn’t fall on deaf ears.
Here’s a full teardown of Faye’s 19-slide pitch deck with which it raised a $10 million Series A round.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Mary Ann and Alex were a dynamic duo this week, taking on...
Info Edge, the largest shareholder in Bizcrum Infotech, the holding firm of Bijnis, has written off its entire investment in the Indian startup, citing “principles of conservatism and prudenc...
Here’s a shoutout to South American early-stage startup founders! We want YOU to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. But you’d better hurry — time is running out. The ...
Five investors talk about the uniqueness of South Korean startups, how they’ve fared in a post-pandemic world and their investment thesis.
We’ve all been there. Shopping online and desperately searching for a promo code so that you can save some money on a purchase. Well, at least I’ve been there. Enter Checkmate. The startup wants t...
Kapital’s platform gives small and medium-sized businesses across Latin America a way to see their finances in one place.
Generation Prime, a startup that wants to make IVF and other fertility services more accessible to patients in Asia, is launching its first two clinics in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. The company also...
Artificial intelligence captures headlines on an almost a daily basis — and for good reason. The technology will have a profound effect on just about every aspect of life for billions of people aro...
Nymbus, a startup that partners with banks to migrate their legacy stack and launch neobanks to attract new customers, today announced that it raised $70 million in a Series D round led by Insight ...
The breast milk powder retains its nutrition and immunological properties and is shelf-stable for up to six months.
In recent years, there’s been no shortage of startups offering credit lines to the underbanked. Most talk about their mission to help people establish credit, which is noble, but they’r...
British startup Satellite Vu has raised £12.7 million ($15.8 million) to develop what it calls “the world’s thermometer”: a satellite constellation capable of monitoring thermal emissions around th...
I’m an international student graduating this month, but the company I was supposed to start working for on OPT has rescinded my job offer.
Elementl, a startup that is building a data platform based on the popular Dagster orchestrator, today announced that it has raised a $33 million Series B round led by Georgian. This round also saw ...
Cybersecurity companies are enjoying stellar growth and multiples, but VCs are still hesitant to invest in these startups. What’s going on?
Arc, the jobs platform created especially for software developers looking for remote positions, wants to make recruitment easier with the launch of HireAI. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, HireAI does mu...
Memcyco, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides businesses with tools to guard against website impersonation, today announced that it has raised a $10 million seed funding. The round was led by Cap...
With concise materials, you can make board meetings more effective and leave room for useful conversations.
There is a groundswell of commercial space initiatives focused on the moon, with established companies and newer upstarts all seeking to transform that cold, grey rock into a thriving hub for scien...
As developers work with an increasing number of third-party APIs, they need a tool that mocks those APIs for testing purposes without actually firing the API gateway. Mock APIs mirror the behavior ...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single...
Hey Atlanta founders! Apply now to pitch at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta event. Next month, TechCrunch Live is shining a spotlight on the Atlanta tech ecosystem once again, in a special (but vir...
Hopscotch, an Indian brand offering fashion wear for kids, has raised $20 million in a funding round led by Amazon amid the ongoing market slowdown and funding crunch that have significantly impact...
Early-stage startup founders, listen up! We’re in the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) homestretch. You have just one week left to hunker down and show us why we should pick you to join our elite c...
U.K. medtech startup Acurable has gained FDA clearance for a novel wireless diagnostic device for remote detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). A formal launch into the U.S. market is slated t...
The $79 billion sneakers (or “trainers,” for our U.K. readers) industry has spawned a lucrative resale market, expected to hit $30 billion by the end of the decade — up from $5 bi...
Incredo’s technology binds real cane or beet sugar with trace amounts of a natural carrier that is able to reduce the amount of sugar in foods by between 30% and 50%.
Skorlife, the fintech that wants to give Indonesians more transparency into their credit scores, has raised $4 million in seed funding. The round was led by Hummingbird Ventures, with participation...
Austin, Texas–based Episode Six, a payments and banking infrastructure provider, today announced that it raised $48 million in a Series C funding round led by Avenir with participation from Anthos ...
We asked you, dear readers, to vote for the breakout sessions you want to see in September at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, and your response was amazing! The 15 contenders did nothing to make your job ...
Landing pages are one of the best places to run experiments, but if you aren’t constantly iterating, you’re leaving money on the table.
Cava’s IPO filing has a host of details about exactly why this was a great time for the restaurant chain to go public.
Remotely monitoring patients without violating their privacy is a challenging task. But one co-founder believes that she’s cracked the code. I’m excited to announce I’m speaking w...
Anthropic, the prominent generative AI startup co-founded by OpenAI veterans, has raised $450 million in a Series C funding round led by Spark Capital. Anthropic wouldn’t disclose what the ro...
Updated with more information from BandLab Technologies’ CEO. Correction also made to the valuation amount in headline. Singapore-based BandLab Technologies, the parent company of social mus...
Here in the States, we’re about to kick off the unofficial start of summer, and nothing puts us in a festive mood faster than a three-day weekend filled with family, friends and food. Unless it’s a...
Plenty takes a goals-based approach to investing with automated forecasting so that couples can plan for milestones they want to achieve together.
A new startup is launching out of stealth today with $5 million in seed funding as it looks to bring its flavor of open source to risk decision-making software in the finance sector. Ballerine, as ...
Meta has finally found a willing buyer for Giphy, the animated GIF search engine it acquired for $400 million three years ago. Shutterstock announced today that it has entered into an agreement wit...
As many as 91% of consumers want to see more videos from brands, according to a recent survey by the startup Wyzowl, which says it surveyed more than 500 respondents. Google meanwhile reported in 2...
It was only recently that we reported Builder.ai had signed a strategic collaboration with an undisclosed investment from Microsoft. Builder’s “Natasha” AI will be shortly available to users of Tea...
This is a critical moment for CIOs and other technical leaders to take stock of their cloud and IT budget and usage.
Welcome back to Found, where we get stories behind the startups. This week, Becca and Dom are joined by Sarah Sandnes, co-founder of SafetyWing.
Daylight, an LGBTQ+ banking platform, is shutting down. Its operations will cease on June 30, according to embattled co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis. The announcement comes months after NY Magazine ...
One major problem with renewable energy sources like wind, solar and hydro is intermittency. This means they cannot be relied on constantly since, for example, the sun might stop shining or ...
Think of CRO as a grand supplement to all the other items the growth side rolls out in the early days of a startup.
You voted in droves and the results are finally in! We can’t wait to hear the 10 incredible roundtables that you chose to send to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, September 19–21 in San Francisco. After co...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
Indian startup Chalo, which is working to transform bus commutes, has raised $45 million in a new funding round and secured an additional $12 million in debt as it works on deepening its mobility o...
Yes, warm intros are the best way to approach investors and should ideally be your Plan A. But what if you can’t get one of those?
If you’re an electrical engineer, DigiKey, Octopart and Mouser are permanently etched into your browser history — all the components you might need, at your fingertips. Volition just ra...
Firmbase, a startup that offers a modern financial planning and analysis platform for startups, has raised a $12 million seed round led by S Capital, with Meron Capital and numerous angel investors...
It’s hard to believe there’s less than a month before TechCrunch (virtually) touches down in Atlanta for our latest TC Live event on June 7th at 2PM EDT. We have a slate of amazing programming plan...
The company provides private banking and investment services specifically tailored to high-earning Millennials and Gen Z.
Infinite Uptime, an Indian industrial IoT startup that offers predictive maintenance solutions for machinery, has secured an additional $18.85 million as part of an ongoing funding round led by Tig...
General Atlantic has poured another $100 million into PhonePe, four months after leading a $350 million investment in the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $850 million in an ongoing fi...
Patient21, a four-year-old German startup that combines a digital healthcare platform with real-world brick-and-mortar clinics, has raised €100 million ($108 million) in a Series C round of funding...
It appears the cloud strategy to follow is heavily dependent on a startup’s compute load and what it aims to achieve.
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive i...
Challenger search engine Neeva is no more, in its current guise at least, as the Mountain View, California-based company revealed that it’s winding down its consumer business. Founders Sridha...
Women should no longer be thought of as a niche. In fact, they’re one of the most significant growth markets we’ve ever seen.
Welcome to Startups Weekly, with your shiny, newly minted host, yours sincerely. If you’ve seen my name on TechCrunch, it’s probably because of my popular Pitch Deck Teardown series, where I take a...
Internal developer portals have emerged as a one-stop shop that lets developers in an organization access all the microservices and tools available to them.
The 10-year-old company that’s been grinding away in a tough industry offers a lot of hints of what the unicorns of 2023 will look like.
In late 2020, Peggy Johnson took the reins as CEO and led Magic Leap’s pivot away from a consumer audience — those less able to swing $2,300 for a mixed-reality headset — to the deeper pockets of t...
Newchip, an online accelerator promising to help startups, has filed for bankruptcy and is now facing insolvency amid employee and client discontent. Dozens of employees of the troubled organizatio...
ARR has always been a key metric, but with valuations down across the board and new money too tight to mention, it’s now a lodestar.
Insurtech is persisting, stubbornly showing a few signs of life despite the carnage in the public markets.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Becca and Alex gathered to chew through...
The price of food continues to go up and up, but surprisingly that hasn’t (yet?) played out as pressure on the wider restaurant industry. Now, a startup that’s building technology to se...
Whether you believe in ESG or subscribe to the “woke capitalism” viewpoint, it simply can’t be ignored.
The startup’s platform helps launch, build and manage distributed renewable energy projects in emerging markets.
Venture debt, in many ways, used to be an afterthought. But in the post-SVB world, raising this kind of debt is going to look very different.
Samsara Eco, an Australian startup that uses enzyme-based tech to recycle plastics, textiles and other materials countless number of times, has struck a major partnership with Lululemon. The deal m...
Yet another early-stage VC fund has closed in Europe this week, as Elkstone finalized a €100 million ($108 million) pot aimed at Irish startups. It comes a day after Lifeline Ventures closed a €150...
Stability AI, the AI startup behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, this week announced the release of StableStudio, an open source version of DreamStudio, Stability AI’s commercial...
Today, we’re looking at Ageras’ pitch deck, which it used to raise a $35 million private equity round to further expand its relatively late-stage product portfolio.
The new fund hopes to deploy the $150 million within three years, and has appointed Paul Judge as its managing partner.
Let’s look at the three most important milestones along the road to predictive analysis in the retail media context.
India’s Swiggy said on Thursday that its marquee food delivery business has become profitable, eclipsing its publicly listed rival Zomato on another key metric a day before the firm is set to...
One pretty obvious aspect of the climate emergency which may have flown under your radar is that human-driven global heating is disrupting traditional approaches to risk modelling around natural di...
VCs don’t think venture debt is going away anytime soon, but five investors said getting it now will look different than before.
What type of visa can we get to come to the U.S. that allows us to stay there so we can grow our startup after the accelerator ends?
If seed valuations continue to rise while later-stage prices dip, how long will it be until the climb from seed to Series A sees startups losing value?
Like it or not, AI is part of our lives from here on out — for better or worse. In the past six months alone, TechCrunch has written nearly 600 articles focused on the impact of AI technology in ou...
Union AI, a Bellevue, Washington–based open source startup that helps businesses build and orchestrate their AI and data workflows with the help of a cloud-native automation platform, today announc...
Obie, a real estate-focused insurance technology company, has raised $25.5 million in a funding round led by Battery Ventures. Since the company’s last raise — a $10.4 million Series A —...
It may be tempting for managers to close on capital as soon as they have it in this quieter funding environment, but that’s probably not the best move.
After being instrumental in launching the Kubernetes open source project, Kubernetes co-founders Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda left Google to launch Heptio in 2016. They then sold the company to VMwa...
Uber’s getting into boats. Well, more into boats than it was previously. At Uber’s third annual Go-GET product event Wednesday in New York City, the ride-hailing company announced that ...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we usually focus on one p...
TechCrunch Live has had a huge 2023. We’ve had some of the best founders and investors speaking to current issues facing startups in nearly every industry. We’ve had talks on how to fin...
Today is the last day to cast your vote for Audience Choice roundtables and breakouts at Disrupt 2023. Voting ends at 11:59 pm PDT tonight. You pick the sessions you want at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023...
Since our founding in 2014, we’ve reached $40 million in ARR through bootstrapping. From there, it was off to the races.
Hey Atlanta founders! Apply now to pitch at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta event. Next month, TechCrunch Live is shining a spotlight on the Atlanta tech ecosystem once again, in a special (but vir...
Embedded insurtech is still hot, as the $196 million in funding landed by bolttech proves. The company, which started in Singapore but now has operations around the world, said it is now valued at ...
Entro, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building a security platform that helps enterprises manage and protect their secrets like account credentials, certificates and API keys, today announced tha...
Jia, a blockchain-based fintech providing loans to micro and small businesses in emerging markets, has raised $4.3 million seed funding, and an additional $1 million commitment for on-chain liquidi...
Venture capital firm Lifeline Ventures today announced a fresh €150 million ($163 million) fund aimed at early-stage startups across Finland. Founded in 2009, Helsinki-based Lifeline Ventures has i...
Wefox, the German insurtech startup, has closed a new funding round from existing investors. The funding amount isn’t going to impress anyone, as the company managed to secure $55 million. This cou...
According to the founder of Singapore-based telehealth platform Ora, 90% of its patients are less than 39 years old and have not been treated for their conditions offline. That puts the onus on Ora...
We analyzed data from 30,000+ SaaS companies — here are five ways you can level up product-led, efficient growth.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, the co-founder and CEO at Samooha, a startup creating the infra...
My dream of never having to drive again is far from dead. I just need to add five or 10 years to my prior timelines.
Psychedelic startups want to make psilocybin, ketamine and other substances more mainstream, but how are investors approaching this space?
The real estate industry is a bit of a greenhouse gas powerhouse, responsible for 40% of all global emissions. A quarter of that comes from building materials, and Tangible has had enough. The comp...
Bird Buddy, the AI-powered smart bird feeder, is bringing the popular pastime of bird-watching into the digital age — and growing its line of products in support of the hobby. With the startu...
The lack of funding and dearth of DEI data suggests that the venture community writ large is overlooking a vast amount of untapped potential.
Belgian startup Telraam designed a device that lets anyone point out of a window a camera-like device that uses on-board tech to count the number of road users. It is currently installing a network...
The business of platforms for purchasing goods and services — in other words, procurement — is alive and well. Case in point, Zip, a startup developing procurement software, yesterday a...
Despite heat pumps’ growing appeal, not all consumers are sold on the idea. This startup hopes to change people’s minds.
Patrick Gilligan’s childhood struggle with food began when he was 10 years old. Placed on a caloric-restrictive diet by a doctor, the regime left him feeling ashamed and alone and triggered what wo...
Normally in the music industry, it’s more or less impossible for ordinary investors to buy music rights. Thus, web3 startups saw an opportunity to tokenize music assets, allowing fans access to mus...
Chances are you don’t like wasting time in useless meetings. People often say “this meeting should have been an email.” But what about one-to-one calls? Could they be a series of voice ...
AI, specifically generative AI, has the potential to transform healthcare. At least, that’s the sales pitch from Hippocratic AI, which emerged from stealth today with a whopping $50 million i...
A big shoutout to the early-stage founders who missed the application window for the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) at TechCrunch Disrupt. We have exciting news just for you! You procrastinators ...
Since its last raise in 2021, the company has gone through an evolution that took it from its origins as a fully custom-coded commission platform to a self-managed platform.
A team of ex-Googlers is today launching a new digital creativity platform, Rooms.xyz, into beta testing. The startup, backed by $10 million in seed funding led by a16z, offers a browser-based tool...
In 1846, London surgeon John Hutchinson invented the spirometer — a thing a doctor normally asks asthma sufferers to blow hard into — to measure the volume of air inspired and expired by the lungs....
Jenfi, a “growth-capital-as-a-service” platform, can provide online businesses with revenue-based financing in as little as a day. The Singapore-based startup announced today it has raised $6.6 mil...
Aldagram, a startup out of Japan developing project management software for construction companies, has picked up a new strategic backer to help it build out its footprint across Asia and the Middl...
Generative AI — AI that can write essays, create artwork and music, and more — continues to attract outsize investor attention. According to one source, generative AI startups raised $1...
For Europe, it seems like the old wisdom of not putting all of your eggs in one basket could be their biggest competitive advantage.
One mistake AI founders commonly make is that building models of client data is sufficient for product-market-fit and differentiation.
Data from AngelList shows that founder-led VC firms outperform but the data is incomplete. While the strategy works well, it has drawbacks, too.
Founders of ZestMoney have resigned from the startup, the latest twist in the fate of the Indian fintech whose ability to underwrite small ticket loans to first-time internet customers once drew th...
Women founders have received just 6.9% of venture dollars in climate tech in Q1, according to Crunchbase, which is down from 8.9% in 2022.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
TechCrunch Live had some amazing shows over the last few months. I know it’s hard to keep up. Every Wednesday, at 12:00 pm PDT, the live event features top founders and investors talking thro...
Everything needs a home, and Garima Kapoor co-founded MinIO to build an enterprise-grade, open source object storage solution. The pitch sounds amazing: simple, high performance, and a native Kuber...
A last call and a major shout-out to any and all early-stage founders. It’s time to dig deep and take advantage of an unparalleled opportunity at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. I’m referring to the...
Smart, a London-based startup that helps employers and their employees manage and monitor their pensions, said that it has closed $95 million in Series E funding. It plans to use the capital to exp...
Oghenetega Iortim built Nigerian-based cold-chain startup Figorr after imagining better means of storage and transportation of temperature-sensitive products, following the post-harvest losses from...
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive i...
Tech workers who have been laid off possess a lot of highly skilled talent that’s poised to take steps in new directions.
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior reporter Natasha Mascarenhas. Startups Weekly readers know I love a pivot story, and now I have one of m...
The impact of technology is going to be so big that both France and the U.K. are right to bet on it, just like Israel did by putting itself on the map as the “Startup Nation.”
Amorai is creating an AI relationship coach but the startup isn’t sharing what it could look like, and an AI expert isn’t sure it would work.
In case you haven’t heard, you — yes you, TechCrunch readers — have a voice and a vote in the programming at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco. Audience C...
How far has the psychedelics medicines industry come over the past 12 months? Well, it depends on where you look.
Any automation needs accurate information to function properly and predictably to deliver the results that startups and enterprises want.
Can open-source foundation AI models level the playing field while addressing concerns about privacy and bias?
Sweden-based VC fund Pale Blue Dot bounced onto the scene in 2020 with a €53 million fund to help climate-focused startups. This fund grew again by €34 million in April 2021, and after deploying in...
Clearly, VC firms are landing on different conclusions while debating how to jump into AI during its nondebatable watershed moment.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex are closing out another news-fil...
Byju’s has raised $250 million in fresh funding and is close to securing an additional $700 million, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch, as the Indian edtech giant builds up ...
It’s all come down to this, the final day of our TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 early-bird sale. We’re not here to judge; we’re simply here to remind you that procrastination is neither your friend nor ki...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
It’s certainly been a minute but we’re bringing some of the TechCrunch crew across the pond during London Tech Week to meet up with U.K.-based investors and rising early-stage founders....
Six years ago, Yiğit Ihlamur, a former senior program manager at Google, observed that AI was surpassing human capabilities in certain areas — at least by his estimation. Equipped with this p...
Millions of people use sign language, but the methods of teaching this complex and subtle skill haven’t evolved as quickly as those for written and spoken languages. SLAIT School aims to chan...
AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that can automatically sort recyclable material, today announced that it extended its Series C round to $99 million, thanks t...
It’s called the sandwich generation for a reason. Millions of people in the U.S. are taking care of parents as they age or deal with illnesses. The constant demands of caregiving, often while worki...
While rising interest rates have caused more than a few financial institutions to topple, a group of well-known fintech companies are posting signs of a comeback.
Capchase Pay prepares quotes automatically and offers flexible payment options across bank accounts and credit cards.
It used to be that having a corporate blog and some paid content was the gist of your marketing department’s content efforts, and that was enough. But as larger companies like Salesforce and HubSpo...
The early-bird clock continues its rapid wind-down, and now you have just 48 hours left to save up to a hefty $800. It’s time to take decisive action and buy your pass to TechCrunch Disrupt by Frid...
Cable enables banks and fintechs to monitor all of their accounts — not just a fraction as before — to know, in real time, if failure controls are working as expected to combat breaches.
CEOs often make the mistake of assuming that a product will seamlessly integrate into their existing tech stack, especially in a tuck-in acquisition.
The U.K.’s floundering National Health Service (NHS) is not in the best of shapes by just about any estimation, the victim of chronic underfunding and understaffing that has led to excruciati...
Builder.ai tapped into a new wave of businesses wanting their own native apps with a turnkey approach, accelerated by the rapid digitization of life during the pandemic. That led to led to a $100 m...
In 2007, Alan O’Herlihy, who previously worked with large SAP installations as well as retail, set out to find a way to help retailers minimize “shrinkage,” or where a store has fewer i...
TechCrunch Disrupt is a global event, and the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort reflects the rich geographic genius the world has to offer. Although we’ve never had a startup from Antarctica, thatR...
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Better Tomorrow Ventures’ Sheel Mohnot landed some of his biggest wins before he ever started a venture firm. The investor previously worked as a partner at 500, previously known as 500 Startups, w...
SoLo Funds has agreed to make certain changes to its practices relating to tips and donations and provide “honest disclosures” to both borrowers and lenders.
Airbnb, Twilio and Amplitude’s earnings together indicate that tech growth is slowing not just for Big Tech, it’s across the board.
The surge of interest in e-sports, online fantasy leagues and more extensive online financial infrastructure have made the concept of real-money gaming more popular among consumers and games develo...
Three days, 72 hours or 4,320 minutes. No matter how you calculate it, time is running out for you to score an early-bird pass to TechCrunch Disrupt and save up to $800. Go to TechCrunch Disrupt 20...
Ola, an Indian ride-hailing startup, has seen its valuation trimmed by its backer Vanguard amid a weakening global economy that has significantly impacted market capitalizations across numerous pub...
The AI startup world may be getting hotter by the day, but there’s a difference between a startup that uses AI and an AI-first startup — and the Allen Institute for AI prides itself on foster...
Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the di...
There are plenty of possible reasons why climate tech’s sudden stumble in Q1 2023 was merely a misstep and not the beginning of a downward spiral.
What do you think about applying for an EB-1A straight away without first using the O-1A as a stepping stone?
Salsa says it can shorten the amount of time it takes for businesses to create a payroll feature to about a month, and without the engineering complexity.
Zamp provides a solution for e-commerce businesses to monitor their sales tax life cycle, including nexus monitoring, product categorization, rooftop-level tax calculation, registration and filing....
The United States credit system as it exists today has been around for decades and many would argue it’s long been in need of an overhaul. In the meantime, a number of startups have emerged in rece...
Talking to users, prospects and non-users will help PMs understand the needs, pain points and challenges cybersecurity teams are facing.
Artificial gravity space station startup Vast announced that it intends to put the first commercial space station in orbit in August 2025 via launch partner SpaceX — which will also provide t...
Dutch startup Farmless has today announced that it has raised a €1.2 million pre-seed equity round at an undisclosed valuation to bring to our tables proteins created without the need for tradition...
Much of our computer time is spent in a web browser, where we check emails, create documents, transfer files, carry out online banking, shop or stream entertainment. This leaves us vulnerable to se...
For founders and investors, there’s no platform like TechCrunch Disrupt. Just as the industry is always evolving and innovating — especially in recent months — we’re doing the same to keep Disrupt ...
Now that Paige Hendrix Buckner is in the role permanently, she and her team “can settle in and have some clarity about where we’re going to be going.”
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Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week we welcome Dominic Madori-Davis to the show as the new cohost of Found! The team is also joined by Allison Luvera and ...
It’s time to make your voice — and your vote — count. Audience Choice voting is live, dear readers, and that means you get to choose the breakout sessions and roundtable discussions you want to see...
It’s often said that large language models (LLMs) along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT are a black box, and certainly, there’s some truth to that. Even for data scientists, it̵...
Every startup isn’t ready to hire a full-time marketer, but that’s no excuse to toss money out the window on paid acquisition.
Different demographics often have different banking needs. So it’s no surprise that we have seen a flurry of financial technology startups offering banking services catered to certain populations b...
Identity management used to mean making sure you had your driver’s license when you left the house, but these days it’s not so easy: Identity fundamentally underpins how we engage with the di...
Anthropic, a startup that hopes to raise $5 billion over the next four years to train powerful text-generating AI systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, today peeled back the curtain on its approach ...
Investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups is the latest bandwagon VCs are piling onto. But as last year’s crypto experts quickly work to rebrand as AI experts, they’ll have to ...
Hey Atlanta founders! Apply now to pitch at TechCrunch Live’s Atlanta event. Next month, TechCrunch Live is shining a spotlight on the Atlanta tech ecosystem once again, in a special (but vir...
It’s time for yet another countdown reminder. You have four — count ’em, just four — more days to take advantage of early-bird pricing on passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place on Septembe...
UVeye’s automated vehicle inspection technology may have started out as a system to detect security threats, but the six-year-old Israeli startup has found deep interest and investment from t...
8fig is building out “C-suite” software for e-commerce companies.
Shares of Indian food delivery firm Zomato ended session on Tuesday at a decline of 6%, hours after it became known that Invesco had cut the valuation of its rival Swiggy. Shares of Zomato ended Tu...
Even the most experienced angel investors and VCs can overlook red flags that are not immediately apparent.
Despite the investor caution narrative permeating the startup world throughout the economic downturn, certain startup-types have been a little more impervious to market conditions. The global suppl...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Casey Handmer is not intimidated by very large quantities. Billions of acres. Thousands of gigawatts of solar power. A billion metric tons of carbon. His startup, Terraform Industries, aims to oper...
Time is relentless and, right now, it’s no friend to procrastination-prone early-stage startup founders. The application window for Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 slams...
“The medium is the message” is the common phrase, but entrepreneur Alexis Traina believes that messages, themselves — text messages to be exact — deserve attention, too. Traina is the CEO and co-fo...
We can all agree that data brokers are creepy and bad, and that in this age they have feasted upon our personal information like never before. Opting out is hard enough — which is why Optery is the...
Crackdowns on the smuggling of U.S. technology in support of Russia’s war effort has wider implications for the tech industry.
Hollywood’s writers already had a mechanism in place to rebuff what they consider to be unfair changes to their compensation and employment. Tech workers don’t have that muscle.
One constant theme we’ve been hearing from the big cloud infrastructure vendors this year is helping customers increase the efficiency of their cloud spend. Cloud bills have grown enormously as com...
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
When mHub opened its doors in Chicago seven years ago, the vision was to create a traditional incubator for people making things. It would involve a prototyping lab, offices, shared workspaces, mee...
PermitFlow has software for developers and general contractors to streamline the construction permit application and management processes.
The countdown to early-bird savings for TechCrunch Disrupt, taking place September 19–21 in San Francisco, continues. You have just five days left to save up to $800 on the price of admission. The ...
After raising $100 million at a valuation of over $2 billion last year, the Australian edtech startup Go1 is making an acquisition and getting some investment to expand its reach and technology to ...
Invesco, which led Swiggy’s previous round, has marked down the Indian food delivery giant’s valuation in its holding to about $5.5 billion, according to a filing. This revised valuatio...
“This is really only talking about world-changing, big-ass businesses with a lot of impact that could be a billion dollars or more in value.”
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive i...
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. It’s been a b...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Because AI requires human input, it is inherently susceptible to bias. What are investors doing to hold founders accountable?
Rapid (previously known as RapidAPI), a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, has laid off another 70 employees less than two weeks after letting go of 50% of it...
Russ Wilcox, founder of E Ink, recently joined TechCrunch’s Found podcast to talk about how he raised multiple down rounds before a successful exit.
Most early-stage startup founders, investors, technologists and all-around aficionados recognize and appreciate a great deal. We’re flagging this one, folks, because you have just one week left to ...
Chegg’s dramatic post-earnings valuation flop will not be the last time that we see new AI tooling run headlong into existing enterprises.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex got right into it R...
Netherlands-based Instruqt has a product allowing companies to more easily test how new software would run inside their organization. After bootstrapping its way to growth, it has now raised €15 mi...
Small to medium-sized enterprises contribute 60% of Indonesia’s gross domestic product. But companies in the D2C space still struggle to compete against bigger brands. Praktis wants to put them on ...
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It’s become increasingly difficult to sign new SaaS customers unless they can demonstrate high and measurable ROI with rapid time to value.
For this week’s teardown, Haje buddied up with the team at Trulytell to improve a slide deck until it became the perfect pitch deck.
Tellus, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed fintech company that claims it can offer people higher yields on their savings balances by using that money to fund certain U.S. single-family-home loans, is u...
Senzai’s technology measures impact, experimentation and optimization to determine which sales campaigns will appeal to customers.
Around two years ago, Victor Cardenas and Kevin Bai — college dropouts from Stanford University and the University of Waterloo, respectively — built a fintech platform called Slash that...
While some seed investors are seeing deal valuations soften, others are passing on companies still looking for too much.
Investing in crypto is not for the faint of heart. The volatile crypto landscape is littered with the remains of high-profile collapses, like Terraform Labs, Three Arrows Capital and FTX. Still, so...
The ability to offer businesses more ways to accept digital payments is crucial globally, but merchants’ specific needs typically differ based on geography. In recognition of those nuances, Liquido...
Dozens of established players and newer entrants are competing to bring the most cutting-edge remote sensing data to customers. These companies may use hyperspectral, thermal, radar or optical inst...
French startup Green-Got is building an alternative to your traditional bank account with a focus on climate change. Essentially, Green-Got guarantees that your savings and the money that is sittin...
Genius doesn’t recognize borders, and neither do we when it comes to the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200). The global search continues for the top early-stage founders building the next generation ...
Many employee engagement and retention tools were created with the assumption that workers spent most of their time at desks. But the majority of the global workforce is deskless, meaning that they...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
I’m planning to stay in the U.S. for a couple of months, but I just realized that my passport expires in September. Should I delay my trip?
Signaling that investments in the supply chain sector remain robust, Pando, a startup developing fulfillment management technologies, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series B round,...
Like many other credit cards, Bend offers rewards, though not the usual cash back or points-based fare. Instead, it offers carbon offsets.
Some onus lies on investors to make sure these new technologies are being built by founders with ethics in mind.
Databricks today announced that it has acquired Okera, a data governance platform with a focus on AI. The two companies did not disclose the purchase price. According to Crunchbase, Okera previousl...
As the pendulum of power swings back toward VCs, down rounds have become more common than the venture community has seen in nearly half a decade.
As brands incorporate generative AI into their creative workflows to generate new content associated with the company, they need to tread carefully to be sure that the new material adheres to the c...
If the company can keep up the pace, it stands to put a significant dent in the carbon footprint of the concrete industry.
Microsoft is extending the Startup Founders Hub, its self-service platform that provides founders with free resources including Azure credits, with a new incubator program called the Pegasus Progra...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a duo, t...
There’s a growing trend, fed by everything from IP concerns to Suez Canal traffic jams, to bring PCB production back to North America.
The U.K.’s competition authority is adding Adobe’s proposed $20 billion bid for digital design rival Figma to its ever-growing to-do list. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) co...
The legal spats between artists and the companies training AI on their artwork show no sign of abating. Within the span of a few months, several lawsuits have emerged over generative AI tech from c...
I’m thrilled to announce this TechCrunch Live event. The startup Cambrian BioPharma is developing a life-changing technology while pioneering a radical approach to a pharmaceutical company. Don’t m...
Even today with all of the layoffs we have seen in the tech industry over the last year, there is still a shortage of technical talent. That’s partly because there is a limited number of workers wi...
In 2021, gig marketplace Fiverr acquired Stoke Talent, a startup developing freelance management tools for employers, for $95 million. The move expanded Fiverr’s business by bringing it into ...
Our global search continues, and today, we’re urging early-stage startups across Africa to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2023. The application window closes on May 15 at 11...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Terrific news for anyone who lacks either the time or the budget to go whole-hog at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21 in San Francisco. We’ve just released a fresh batch of Expo+ passes in...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Stefan Bauer, the co-founder and CEO at Marker Learning, a startup that looks to make ...
Instead of playing the hero during startup board meetings, CEOs should allow team leaders to speak for themselves.
Mozilla announced today that it has acquired Fakespot, a startup that offers a website and browser extension that helps users identify fake or unreliable reviews. The financial terms of the deal we...
Payments infrastructure startup Finix has slowly been taking swipes at Stripe, first becoming a facilitator, and now becoming a processor. Finix said today it now is directly connected to all major...
In the wake of FRB’s collapse, founders and investors continue to wonder: Where is the best place to protect important assets?
Based on our experience, these are the important questions we see smart security founders answering in their pitches.
With the new funding, Pietra enters the commerce enablement sector with a revamped monthly subscription membership for access to free software tools.
Citymapper is lowering the paywall around its premium features and introducing a new subscription plan purely for removing ads. The move comes less than two months after the popular transit and tra...
Worldwide, about one in six people live with a disability. Whether through injury or illness, disability can manifest itself as an impediment to mobility. There have been fantastic advancements in ...
In early 2022, you may remember, we called for experts to submit applications to present breakout sessions and roundtable discussions at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, taking place on September 19–21 in ...
The battery industry is on the cusp of a radical change, and a $10M seed round raised by Chemix shows why.
Several years ago, entrepreneur Dhiraj Sharma’s first company, a software consultancy, was hired by an HR tech firm to develop an app to improve the employee onboarding experience. Instead of...
Ann Lai, a general partner at Bullpen Capital, has been fired from the firm, she says. The investor described the termination experience as “discriminatory and retaliatory” in a LinkedIn post publi...
Love launches as a wellness marketplace that features an initial 200 curated products, like supplements, health testing kits and essential oils.
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
You blinked, and suddenly there are only two weeks left to apply to the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. Maybe you meant to submit — or finish — your application, but life is ful...
Ahead of Meta’s launch of a text-based social network, female-founded social networking startup RTRO is launching its app this week with the goal of connecting brands, creators and their fans...
It’s a perennial question for early-stage startups: how does one find product-market fit (PMF)?
Poparazzi, the once-hot photo-sharing app that hit the top of the App Store in 2021, is shutting down. The company announced the news via a Medium blog late last week, informing users that the app ...
Picking a fight with warm intros — replacing them with the 5-minute hurdle of having to record a video — has given GoAhead Ventures an edge, it believes.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
Now that you have reached competitive yield rates, spending valuable time trying to squeeze out additional value is a mistake.
Back in February, we started calling for content — urging startup subject-matter experts to submit applications to lead roundtable discussions or breakout sessions at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on Sep...
I’ll describe the type of data needed to make onboarding unique and will share some examples of how I’ve implemented this myself.
First Republic Bank (FRB), on the brink of collapse in the weeks after the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, has finally fallen over, but with a relatively quick resolution into its next chapter: Today t...
In this increasingly AI-driven era, creative and media teams will probably need to employ the technology to up their game on analyzing their creative assets and A/B testing — or someone else will s...
TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 takes place on September 19–21 in San Francisco and — if you don’t already know — it’s the startup world’s big tent. It draws founders, investors, CEOs, tech professionals, ...
“Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.
There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Tech’s guidin...
Generative AI isn’t just about creative endeavors and parlor tricks.
Updated to note that the Microsoft investment closed in January. The money from VCs reported here, part of a tender offer, is separate to that. OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversati...
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Reducing CAC Payback and following the Rule of 40 is proof that a founding team knows how to move directionally. Investors love that.
Let’s talk venture results, unique issues to the African startup scene, and look ahead to see if we can spy any good news on the horizon.
It’s hard to win on social media, but Redpoint’s head of content Rashad Assir thinks the potential rewards make it totally worth the grind.
Mobile messaging services provider Postscript took to the Twitterverse earlier this month after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from competitor Attentive.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex were especially chatte...
Personas persist throughout the entire customer lifecycle and are more than just a way to segment customer types; it’s a DNA marker.
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Clubhouse, a once skyrocketing social audio app built by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, has laid off more than half of its staff. The startup’s co-founders made the decision in response to customer h...
Chief, a professional network designed for women in leadership, has cut 14% of staff, or 43 jobs today, saying in an email seen by TechCrunch that the move is a response to the economy and that the...
Let’s dig in and look to see if we can find some clues as to why the company caught the eye of these investors.
Investors continue to pump money into generative AI tech. Case in point, Replit, an IDE startup developing a code-generating AI-powered tool called Ghostwriter, this week raised nearly $100 million...
Luca, a startup building price planning and prediction tools for retailers, today announced that it closed a $2.5 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Y Combinator (Luca...
It’s possible to build a startup with a founder who wants to stay in academia, but it’s not without its challenges.
When Pinecone launched a vector database aimed at data scientists in 2021, it was probably ahead of its time. But as the use cases began to take shape last year, the company began pushing AI-driven...
The company develops whole cuts of alternative proteins using fermentation technology and food-grade microorganisms.
More than 10,000 people from across the country and around the world will converge on San Francisco for TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 on September 19–21. A startup crowd that size has a wide range of rol...
POSH is an event management and ticketing platform for all users to host events large or small, regardless of if you’re an event organizer, promoter or if you just want to charge your friends a cov...
Easyship, the New York- and Singapore-based startup that enables e-commerce sellers to integrate with more than 250 courier services, announced today it has expanded its partnership with eBay to su...
Capital efficiency remains a blind spot for most founders, who rely on a single metric to draw conclusions.
Italian climate startup Energy Dome, which has developed a “CO2 Battery” for storing renewable energy, has closed a €40 million (~$44 million) Series B round — bringing the total ...
Meet Bastion, a French startup that was created in October 2022 to help small companies tackle cybersecurity risks without too many complexities. Created by former Palantir employees, the company h...
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Grubhub is launching a pilot program with Joco, a docked e-bike rental platform based in New York City, to provide at least 500 gig delivery workers with free access to e-bikes. Ensuring that deliv...
Having the ability to load up a digital wallet to pay for goods and services at businesses you frequent, and then earn rewards for those purchases, would be convenient and well, rewarding. But as o...
Greycroft, the self-styled “seed-to-growth” venture capital firm, today announced the closing of over $1 billion in capital commitments across new funds. The firm’s two flagship vehicle...
Launching a startup is a solitary activity, but it doesn’t have to be. Joining an incubator can help you connect with like-minded people.
Containers and micro services may not be a new concept at this point, but lots of companies are struggling with the transition to cloud native applications, and the impact of that approach on their...
Register for this TechCrunch Live right here. The show broadcasts live today, Wednesday, April 26 at 12 p.m. PDT. Sam Chaudhary takes his time. The founder of ClassDojo, an edtech consumer app that...
There is a shift in the air, and it feels like companies need to be thinking about how to put large language models to work, but as with any new advanced technology, it’s often easier said than don...
Lookout’s long-running transition to becoming an enterprise security company is all but complete, revealing today that it’s selling its consumer mobile security business to Finland̵...
Smile Identity, a KYC compliance and ID verification partner for many African fintechs and businesses, has acquired Inclusive Innovations, the parent company of Appruve, a Ghanaian developer of ide...
Japanese shared micromobility startup Luup has raised $30 million (4.5 billion yen) in a Series D financing round, which consists of 3.8 billion yen in equity and 700 million yen in debt. Luup has ...
The energy-intensive process of separating and purifying chemicals and gases is a big reason industries like plastic manufacturing cause so much pollution. UniSieve wants to reduce their carbon emi...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
If you’ve added “AI” to your pitch deck to make it more appealing, I have some bad news: FOMO is passé, and due diligence is the new black.
Until the IPO window reopens — or until unicorns are willing to be dehorned on the way out — there is little reason to hope that exit activity will perk up.
Rapid (previously known as RapidAPI), a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, is cutting 50% of its staff TechCrunch has learned. According to an email to employ...
We’re coming at you live from TechCrunch’s Early Stage in Boston. Darrell and Becca are joined onstage by Russ Wilcox who founded E Ink and is currently a partner at Pillar VC. They discussed how R...
I’m going to save you some time: many, if not most, of you are probably not yet ready to pitch an investor.
Yahoo today announced that it has acquired Wagr, a three-year-old social sports betting startup based out of Nashville. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. TechCrunch, whose parent company happen...
To date, Summer has delivered over $1 billion in total projected savings for student loan borrowers across the United States.
Data is becoming as precious as water in precision agriculture, and Hydrosat aims to help provide both with a new set of Earth observation satellites. The company has raised a $20 million A round, ...
Hardly any companies comprehensively track their emissions, but new government regulations will require it.
ZEBOX, an international accelerator network founded by shipping conglomerate CMA CGM to introduce more tech innovation into the supply chain industry, announced today the launch of its APAC headqua...
Every time a member of their crew changes, maritime crew managers need to handle immigration regulations, COVID requirements and travel plans for each person. This is usually done through emails wi...
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Adopting Internet of Things (IoT) tech for the office isn’t easy — especially at enterprise scale. Companies have IoT device administration to worry about, and also building out the inf...
To get the economics right for large-volume commodity food products, the precision fermentation industry should focus in on a few areas.
These innovations rolled out with hype and momentum, but they ultimately failed to change the way the average person manages their money.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the we...
It’s worth remembering that the difference between an actual software company and a company that offers a service via software is often massive and tough to overcome.
Constrafor provides embedded financing and software to keep payments flowing between contractors and their subcontractors.
Super.com’s super app is focused on helping “everyday Americans” find deals and savings across multiple categories, including travel and shopping.
The Inflation Reduction Act hasn’t changed the company’s business model, but it has changed its business plans.
If you don’t have a closing slide, your greatest weaknesses might be left up on the screen while you talk with investors and answer questions.
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Swytch offers regular bike riders a way to turn their existing bike into something with a little more oomph.
While it would be ideal if the startup made it, the financial returns, perhaps lasting decades, come through the IP operation.
Let’s look into cybersecurity sales, developer content marketing, and fundraising pitches through a common lens: The importance of understanding your audience and putting it first.
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If someone said “startup” while we were playing a word association game, I’d respond with “fundraising.” (I bet you would, too.)
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week we recorded at Early Stage, TechCrunch’s ev...
The usual corollary of risk is insurance against it; but when it comes to cloud downtime, the insurance sector hasn’t fully caught up yet.
Startup experts! Today’s the last day that you can apply to lead a session at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in September. The time has come to stop procrastinating and Get. It. Done! Today’s your last ch...
Largely because of their age, houses in Europe can be notoriously hard to heat. Most were built for an era when the knowledge about energy consumption just wasn’t available in the way it is t...
Betterdata, a Singapore-based startup that uses programmable synthetic data to keep real data secure, announced today it has raised $1.55 million. The seed round, which it says was oversubscribed, ...
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Every so often, a new startup crosses your radar and reminds you how exciting hardware can be. It’s a relative rarity in consumer electronics, a category dominated by corporations like Samsung, App...
The company didn’t remove any slides from its 18-slide deck, but it redacted revenue numbers and blurred customer and competitor logos.
Our Call for Content period ends tomorrow, April 21, so if you’re a startup expert — of any stripe — and want a shot at leading a session at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 19–21, you need to apply...
HUSSLUP, currently an invite-only beta, is a job search and networking app for creative professionals in the media and entertainment industry to connect with studios and production companies lookin...
Following the Colonial Pipeline incident in 2021, Jon Miller and Ryan Smith wondered why, with the widespread adoption of security tools, ransomware was still growing exponentially. It’s an o...
CoreWeave, an NYC-based startup that began as an Ethereum mining venture, has secured a large tranche of funding as it continues to transition to a general-purpose cloud computing platform. CoreWea...
Sometimes, it’s good to ask yourself if you’re raising capital in anticipation of pain that may never materialize.
After selling their hospitality tech startup, Teranga, in 2018, Senegalese brothers Moustapha and Alioune Ndoye ventured into the trucking business as they pondered their next move. However, it soo...
French startup Kate has raised a $7.6 million (€7 million) funding round from a bunch of business angels. As I wrote in my previous article on Kate, the company has ambitious goals when it comes to...
Interested in tech, Quah Zheng Wei left his career as a chartered accountant to teach himself how to code. But it was his experience as an accountant that led to his interest in the blockchain and ...
Meet Primo, a French startup that recently raised a $3.4 million funding round to build a software-as-a-service product that handles the IT needs of small and medium companies. Primo keeps track of...
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Sam Chaudhary takes his time. The founder of ClassDojo, an edtech consumer app that focuses on student classrooms, spent eight years building the company before introducing a formal revenue model. ...
Stability AI, the startup behind the generative AI art tool Stable Diffusion, today open sourced a suite of text-generating AI models intended to go head to head with systems like OpenAI’s GP...
The concept of taking existing properties and repurposing them is not a new one. After all, Airbnb is a high-profile example of people turning vacation homes, for example, into revenue generators w...
Munch-based climate tech startup Tanso, which sells software to help industrial manufacturers carry out sustainability reporting and carbon accounting, has banked €6.5 million in early stage growth...
For many, ChatGPT and the generative AI hype train signals the arrival of artificial intelligence into the mainstream. But while there’s little question of a seismic sea change these past six...
One day, my dream would be to create my own startup in the U.S. Is there any groundwork I am allowed to lay to make my dream come true?
Calling all founders with a startup in stealth mode! Unless you’ve been buried under a rock in an undisclosed remote location, you already know that the Startup Battlefield 200 (SB 200) is the worl...
We can learn quite a lot from venture capital investments themselves.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode, where we niche down to a si...
Many apps today assume that data lives in only one location, typically a single cloud database. But the reality is more complex. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud infrastructu...
Isaac Heller and Amir Boldo spent over ten years in finance across private equity-backed and pre-IPO companies. At these firms, they dealt with CFOs who wanted to save money by consolidating manual...
Traditional VCs are still stuck with their now low-margin businesses, unable to move forward and invest in the next big thing: deep tech.
While generative AI is buzzy right now, what OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are doing may be only part of the story. There is also the process of using biology: the idea of using stem cells to create...
Electric and autonomous trucking company Einride is expanding to the U.K., representing the latest in a line of European market expansions. Einride said that it’s looking to target the 1.6 bi...
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Global fintech funding totaled $15 billion in the first quarter of this year, growing 55% from the fourth quarter, according to CB Insights’ latest State of Fintech report. While this generally ma...
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Darrell and Becca are joined by Trevor Martin the co-founder and CEO of Mammoth Biosciences, a startup that uses CRISP...
SaaS companies are like leaky rowboats: if retention rates don’t overcome customer churn, you will take on water and sink to the bottom.
Rally provides one-click checkout and post-purchase offers that allow the merchant to inject offers after the checkout.
Softr’s quick revenue expansion is a good reminder that there’s more to keep an eye on than just AI.
Mediwhale co-founder and CEO Kevin Choi discovered that he had lost vision in nearly half of one of his eyes from glaucoma when he was 24, which is rare in young people. “I was devastated and...
Get ready for a Cheers reference because, like the Boston bar where everybody knows your name, we’re issuing a last call for tickets to TC Early Stage taking place this Thursday, April 20 in — wher...
Hardware development is complex and challenging, and requires substantial investment in materials, tooling, manufacturing and logistics.
High retention indicates strong product-market fit. It is proof that you are solving a real problem and are adding value to your customers.
Ideally, when it comes to building secure applications, it’s best to check the code as it moves through the development process, so that vulnerabilities can be found before it gets into production....
Security has a data problem. That’s according to Kfir Tishbi, who led the engineering team at Datorama, a marketing analytics company that was acquired by Salesforce in 2018. Tishbi — w...
Capital markets are changing, which means financing options for companies are changing as well.
Odeko has operations software for coffee shops to manage inventory, get data insights and order equipment and supplies from over 400 vendors.
Ada, a Toronto-based customer service automation startup, has been around long enough to predate the use of large language models in its solutions, but today the company is announcing a new suite o...
The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars, but to this day it’s been tough to disrupt with technology. Traditional consulting firms provide high-quality services, but t...
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A U.K. credit card rewards startup aimed at millennials and Gen Z consumers has stumbled upon a combined business model that has now secured it £12.5 million ($15.4 million in an equity round from ...
The functional beverage market is indeed “exploding:” Cure continues to have about 60% penetration in e-commerce, and outpaced first-quarter 2022 growth by 121%.
It turns out that when you compare later-stage startup spending cuts with their earlier peers, the bigger startups are doing a better job.
The doors to TechCrunch Early Stage (Boston Edition) open in just three days, and we cannot wait to meet and greet you! If you haven’t booked your pass yet, hurry! We’re running low on ticket...
Healthcare firms are scrambling to reassess how their websites collect user data following HHS’ web-tracking crackdown — and your startup could be next.
The Y Combinator alumnus quickly adapted its technology after the Inflation Reduction Act changed the economics of carbon capture.
New data indicates that venture investors are on their way back to preferring growth over profitability at startups.
Heads-up, early-stage startup experts. Your chance to apply to lead a session at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 19–21 in San Francisco ends on Friday April 21 at 11:59pm PT. That’s this Friday! Ap...
As the economy has gotten tougher, plenty of companies have switched from buying in assets to renting them. There’s a tortuous acronym for this which is XaaS or “everything as a service,” also refe...
When it comes to education, mathematics has long been considered one of the most challenging of subjects both to learn and to teach. A startup out of Barcelona called Innovamat believes it’s ...
The fact that influencers are shifting their strategies to shorter-form content is a clear signal for startups to follow suit.
There have been several startup attempts to measure staff morale, some more halting than others. We reported on Plasticity Labs back in 2014, though their web site seems no longer functioning. Offi...
French startup Fleet has been growing nicely over the past four years as the company has deployed nearly 10,000 devices with long-term leasing contracts. The company hasn’t raised any outside fundi...
Anyone in the U.K. who has tried to book an NHS medical appointment of late will know just how much of an ordeal it can be, with median waiting times for consultant-led elective care (i.e. pre-plan...
Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive i...
Founders should communicate to investors what a round of funding unlocks. That’s expressed in milestones, not in time.
Hello, friends. Looking for a recap of this week’s news? You’re in the right place. It’s Week in Review (WiR), the (more or less) regular newsletter that recaps the top stories fr...
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior reporter Natasha Mascarenhas. After a Tahoe-based tech conference, Sheel Mohnot, the fintech investor be...
A look at what generative AI means for enterprise buyers; as well as some notes on why your company may want to be like Figma, and how the investing side of the market is adjusting to down rounds.
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Autonomous tractors, semi trucks and warehouse restocking bots have gone from concept to reality. Is robotics mainstream now?
Rodriguez said he was inspired to launch the company as a way to help, specifically Black and brown artists, retain equity in their creative work.
To find customer retention data points that have strong investor appeal, start studying these engagement stats from your existing customers.
Let’s start with an obvious truth: Hardware is hard. We’ve all heard the cliché — and implicitly understand it to be truth. The good news is such difficulties give us a lot to talk about R...
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex enjoyed the warming ...
Zoom today announced plans to acquire Workvivo, a six-year-old Irish startup focused on improving companies’ internal communications and culture. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Wh...
Emerging managers saw the funding declines of 2022 continue into 2023. But I think the space is worth getting excited about.
European accelerators are going through an interesting time right now. For instance, Techstars Stockholm was all set to launch and then abruptly shut down. And I think it’s now commonly accepted th...
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Here are the steps any tech company can take to better understand and improve their developers’ experience.
Elevate, a consumer benefits administration platform, today announced that it raised $28 million in a funding round led by Anthemis with participation from Fin Capital Norwest Venture Partners, Gre...
In a sign that the seed-stage AI segment is still alive and kicking, Betaworks, the startup studio and VC firm, is launching a new program that’ll award $500,000 in funding to approximately 1...
Stability AI, the startup funding a range of generative AI experiments, has released a new version of Stable Diffusion, the text-to-image AI system that was among the first to rival OpenAI’s ...
We spoke to 13 of the top robotics VCs to discuss where the category is and what the future looks like.
When it comes to measuring SaaS success, companies look at a number of key metrics, including annual recurring revenue (ARR) and net revenue retention (NRR). The latter measures the amount of recur...
While it may be a long time until we see significant movement toward consumer protections in crypto, one thing is certain: CeFi and DeFi cannot exist without each other.
Generative AI, particularly text-to-image AI, is attracting as many lawsuits as it is venture dollars. Two companies behind popular AI art tools, Midjourney and Stability AI, are entangled in a leg...
Tomer Greenwald, Uri Sarid and Ori Shoshan, software developers by trade, found themselves building and configuring software authentication and authorization mechanisms repeatedly — each time...
Meet Thynk, a new company that wants to build the definitive enterprise software solution for the hospitality industry. The startup just raised a $13 million Series A round. This round was led by S...
Danish company LMS365, an online learning management system (LMS) built for use inside Microsoft products, has raised $20 million in its first institutional round of funding. Used by companies incl...
Hello, friends, and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Most unicorns never were what they were purported to be. Instead, a lot of startups were granted big budgets to LARP as unicorns.
Ever since the tech downturn began affecting startups, a question kept coming up: What if we are witnessing a correction?
A new fleet of startups is providing access to secondary deal data, which tells us how companies are doing in an otherwise quiet market.
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where today we’re niching...
Device42, a startup that helps companies understand and manage their hybrid infrastructure, can see a lot of information about each customer’s hardware and software usage. The company decided to us...
Soon after launching Ocho, a startup offering personal finance support for business owners, Ankur Nagpal realized that the company’s debut product — a solo 401(k) retirement account ...
I’m excited to announce the co-founder and CEO of Habi, Brynne McNulty Rojas, is joining me on an extra-special edition of TechCrunch Live on April 12 at 12 p.m. PDT. Brynne leads the hot real esta...
A reader asks for help determining how long their wait for a green card will be, how to parse the State Department’s Visa Bulletin and more.
Small businesses in Latin America got another boost in lending support with the investment of $4 million in Kala, a Colombia-based company building fintech infrastructure for lending. The company, ...
As Gen Z turns into their early-to-mid 20s, a new generation of business owners is coming online. Many of these new entrepreneurs do the vast majority of work on their phones. This is especially tr...
Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Then you’ll want to refer the top early-stage startups in your portfolio/pipeline Rolodex to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt...
General Atlantic has poured another $100 million into PhonePe, three months after leading a $350 million investment in the Indian fintech startup that has so far raised $750 million in an ongoing f...
Founded in 2015, MindX was created to address the lack of coding in Vietnamese school curriculums. The startup’s goal is to create “small Silicon Valleys” across Vietnam, with educational centers t...
When Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse was first unfolding, a belated disclosure colored some of the chaos: The bank spent most of last year without a chief risk officer, and the one who left sold mor...
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